PB Poetry Festival Names Joy Harjo as Special Guest Poet in January 2020

Susan Williamson, Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, today announced that Joy Harjo will be the Special Guest Poet at the 16th annual festival that will be held January 20-25, 2020 at Old School Square in Delray Beach. An award-winning Native American poet and musician from Oklahoma, Harjo was recently named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poet.

Joy Harjo's books of poetry include Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. Her memoir Crazy Brave won several awards, including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the American Book Award. Her ninth book of poetry, An American Sunrise, will be published later this year.

She is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation for Lifetime Achievement, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for proven mastery in the art of poetry; a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the United States Artist Fellowship. In 2014 Harjo was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame.

A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally, both solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynamics. She has five award-winning CDs of music including the award-winning album Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears and Winding Through the Milky Way, which won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

During the Palm Beach Poetry Festival 2020, Harjo will be interviewed by faculty poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar, and will deliver the annual Thomas Lux Memorial Reading following the festival gala.

About the Palm Beach Poetry Festival 2020:

The 16th annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival will be held January 20-25. 2020 at Old School Square in Delray Beach. The Festival will feature top poets at numerous ticketed public events, including readings, talks, interviews, panel discussions and more. Poetry workshops will be offered for which applications are required.

The Workshop Faculty of the 2020 Palm Beach Poetry Festival will include Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Nickole Brown, Reginald Gibbons, Jessica Jacobs, Major Jackson, Ilya Kaminsky, Dana Levin, Adrian Matejka, and Maggie Smith. One-on-One Conference Faculty includes Lorna Blake, Sally Bliumis-Dunn, and Angela Narciso Torres. Poet-at-Large Patricia Smith will give readings at four local high schools and at the Crest Theatre on Friday, January 24.

The Palm Beach Poetry Festival 2019 was presented in partnership with Old School Square and was generously sponsored by Art Works of the National Endowment for the Arts, Morgan Stanley, The Legacy Group of Morgan Stanley's Atlanta, GA office, the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County, The Tourist Development Council of Palm Beach County; the Board of Commissioners of Palm Beach County, The Palm Beach Post, a grant from Visit Florida, WLRN-FM, and Murder on the Beach, Delray Beach's independent bookseller.

In 2010, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival received an Arts Challenge Grant from The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; and in 2011, it was presented with The Muse Award for Outstanding Cultural Organization (with a budget under $500,000) by the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County.

For more information about the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, please visit www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org.

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