Joy Harjo, a member of the Mvskoke Nation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a poet best known for her critically acclaimed books of poetry. “Born to a Creek father and a French-Cherokee mother” (Moyers 159), she lives a life very much rooted in the Native American culture of connection and celebration of the inner voice. As she states in her interview with Moyers, being part of a culture that still has living oral traditions and vital heroic figures and the inspiration of her aunt Lois Harjo Ball helped her develop this voice within her. As a result of this and his upbringing, he discovered multiple muses that appeared in his writing process, such as the old Creek Indian, and found one motif – a round rocking chair from the Chicago Indian Center – that consistently reappeared in a corner. of his vision as various Indian Center figures sat there for inspiration. More recently, her work earned her the Wallace Stevens Award “for demonstrated mastery of the art of poetry” (poets.org) from the Academy of American Poets, and in 2009, she also won a Native American Music Award as the best female artist of the year with her music. In addition to this, she is a regular contributor to the "Comings and Goings" column of the Muscogee Nation News and is a professor of English and American Indian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay. Stylistically, Harjo's poems are based on a combination of prayer, song, storytelling and singing. In his book How We Became Human, he displays a number of variations of his highly descriptive, free-form poems, many of which convey heartfelt and profound messages. Harjo makes use of both first and third person narrative in his poems, showing a versatility in perspective through works such as "For Alva Benson, and for those who learned to speak" (Harjo 33-34) - with the third person - and "This Is My Heart" (167-168), using a first-person point of view. Some of his poems also make use of structural repetition and consecutive sentences, such as "Say I..." and "Say we.. ." in "Desire" (Harjo 81), as well as "This Is My Heart", with :“This is my heart. It's a good heart. This is my soul. It's a good soul. This is my It's my song.” Harjo's writing focuses primarily on the themes of his Native American identity and personal survival, the twin realms of earth and the spirit world, and human connection. , Harjo recounts her experience crossing the Canadian border. She describes herself and her traveling party as "Indians in an Indian car, trying / to find a Delaware powwow / that was just mentioned in Milwaukee" (Harjo). 20-21), a group of Americans who were native-born and separated from their nation of origin. in the prejudice to which they are subjected. Despite this injustice, Harjo continues to see the world around her with eyes open to its beauty, praying to the “scarlet-lighted gods” (Harjo 127-128) and admiring how “the sun breaks upon the gaping mountain” in “Songline of 'Dawn." Likewise, Harjo is very in tune with his spirituality, developing a sense of self-awareness and faith in the powers that exist beyond our physical realm. In his poem “The Path to the Milky Way Leads Through Los Angeles” (Harjo 141-142), observes that “the glimmer of the gods / is easiest to perceive at dawn or dusk” and that “we must matter to the strange god who imagines us spinning / together in the dark sky on the way to Milky Way." He seamlessly weaves spiritual concepts into poems about the physical realm and creates a world that is all