Joy Harjo

In 2019, Joy Harjo was appointed the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold the position and only the second person to serve three terms in the role. Harjo’s ten books of poetry include Weaving Sundown in a Scarlett Light, An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. She is also the author of two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, which invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her “poet-warrior” road. She has edited several anthologies of Native American writing, including When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, and Living Nations, Living Words, the companion anthology to her signature poet laureate project. Her many writing awards include the 2022 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2019 Jackson Prize from Poets & Writers, the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and is artist-in-residence for the Bob Dylan Center. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally; her most recent album is I Pray For My Enemies. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, and essayist whose work explores the lives of the working class. Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, the National Medal of Arts, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation. Her novel The House on Mango Street has sold over seven million copies, has been translated into over twenty-five languages, and is required reading in elementary, high school, and universities across the nation. In 2024, The House on Mango Street was published in the Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics Series. A new collection of poetry, Woman Without Shame, Cisneros’s first in 28 years, was published in 2022 by Knopf and also by Vintage Español in a Spanish language translation, Mujer sin vergüenza, by Liliana Valenzuela. Cisneros is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico. As a single woman, she chose to have books instead of children. She earns her living by her pen.

Juan Felipe Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera is the 21st Poet Laureate of the United States (2015-2016) and is the first Latino to hold the position. From 2012-2014, Herrera served as California State Poet Laureate. Herrera’s many collections of poetry include California Brown: Illuminations & Hollers; Every Day We Get More Illegal; Notes on the Assemblage; Senegal Taxi; Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007. He is also the author of Crashboomlove: A Novel in Verse, which received the Americas Award. His books of prose for children include I Am the Future; SkateFate; Calling The Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Award; Upside Down Boy, which was adapted into a musical for young audiences in New York City; and Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box. His book Jabberwalking, a children’s book focused on turning your wonder at the world around you into weird, wild, incandescent poetry, came out in 2018. Herrera is also a performance artist and activist on behalf of migrant and indigenous communities and at-risk youth.

Brenda Child

Brenda J. Child is Northrop Professor and former Chair of the Departments of American Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, where she received the President’s Engaged Scholar Award in 2021. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2022-23.

Child is the author of several books in American Indian history, including Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (Nebraska, 1998), which won the North American Indian Prose Award; and Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (Penguin, 2012). Her 2014 book My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation (MHS Press, 2014) won the American Indian Book Award. She edited a book, Ojibwe and Ochethi Sakowin Artists and Knowledge Keepers (Minnesota, 2024) with Howard Oransky, and curated an exhibit of the same title that was at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota in January-March 2024. Her current book project is The Marriage Blanket: Love, Violence, and the Law in Indian Country.

Child is the author of a best-selling bilingual book for children, Bowwow Powwow (2018), and the forthcoming BlueBearies. She was a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Museum of the American Indian-Smithsonian (2013-18) and was President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (2017-18). She was a consultant to a major exhibit, Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories at the Heard Museum. She has a popular documentary, Jingle Dress Dancers in the Modern World.

Child was born on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota. She was part of a committee developing a new constitution for the 15,000-member nation. She lives with her husband, the Mille Lacs Ojibwe artist Steven Premo, and family in St. Paul and Bemidji, Minnesota.