Joy Harjo is the celebrated author of nine books of poetry and the memoir
Crazy Brave. She edited the collection of Native nations poetry,
When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through. And her most recent album is
I Pray for My Enemies. Joy Harjo was born and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where, six generations ago, her ancestors were forcibly relocated from their homelands in Alabama.
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So I actually started reading
Crazy Brave a few months ago, during the pandemic. And I kind of read it like poetry. I read it a little bit at a time and savored it a bit at a time, which was a wonderful way to read it. And in preparing to be with you, I looked at some other interviews you’ve done, and I really want to draw into your sensibility, your gifts of seeing and knowing, which includes vision and dreams and memories that are not contained in this lifetime. And I felt like people don’t really go there with you, although you go there in your writing. For example, you’ve written that you relived your own birth in a vision on a mountainside in Colorado, I think around the age of 40. And I wondered, you know, normally a question will be, to somebody, “Where did you grow up?” [