In 'Poet Warrior', Joy Harjo uses poetry to deal with pain and heal

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4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2026

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

This week, we're celebrating National Poetry Month by revisiting some of our favorite conversations with poets. Joy Harjo, who was the U.S. poet laureate from 2019 to 2022, says she has always been drawn to healing ever since she was little. She even studied pre-med in college. But it wasn't until Harjo heard Native poets that she realized "this is a powerful tool of understanding and affirmation." She shares her poetry and story in the book, Poet Warrior.

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0:00.0	Hey, Tim Bidermis here. April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate, we're returning
0:05.8	this week to some of our favorite interviews with poets. Here's Andrew Limbong.
0:12.1	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The poet Ada Limon just got named
0:17.9	the U.S. Poet Laureate. It's one of those jobs that it is whatever you make it
0:23.8	to be, you know, encouraging the appreciation and creation of poetry in this country is a pretty
0:29.7	broad goal and different people approach it in different ways. The previous poet laureate, Joy Harjo,
0:35.2	had been in the position since 2019.
0:38.5	And last year, she talked to NPR's Michelle Martin about her poetic memoir, Poet Warrior.
0:43.6	And she talked about how she didn't see herself becoming a poet growing up.
0:47.8	Being a native person, she thought, okay, my community needs health care and doctors,
0:52.5	so that's what I'm going to do.
0:54.4	Until she saw other native poets and realized that poetry fulfills a need, too.
1:01.9	Before Joy Harjo became a renowned poet, artist, an editor, she was a quiet child who was more likely to take in the world from the sidelines than become the
1:11.1	center of attention. But in a powerful, and yes, poetic new memoir, the U.S. Poet Laureate charged
1:17.1	the journey to finding her voice and finally learning how to use it. And she shares the lesson
1:21.9	she's learned along the way. It's called Poet Warrior. And Joy Harjo is with us now to tell us
1:27.4	about it. Welcome back to this program. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. We last spoke with you about the gorgeous anthology of Native poetry that you co-edited, and that's just one of your many published works. I mean, you have authored, what, nine poetry collections, and you've even
1:44.9	published a previous memoir called Crazy Brave. So what were you hoping for with this new work?
1:51.2	Why this book and why now? This book was written during the pandemic, you know, a time of great
1:58.4	political division, climate change, all of those parts of the story that every one of us is confronting and dealing with right now individually and collectively.
2:11.1	It's also a time in the life of the age of a country and of a planet and so on to look back and see what our intent
2:19.5	is, who we are, who we are becoming.
	...

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