Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022 and is winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2024 Frost Medal, Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and was recently honored with a National Humanities Medal.

The author of ten books of poetry, including the highly acclaimed, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years, several plays, children’s books, and non-fiction works, and two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, her many honors include the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Harjo delivered the 2021 Windham-Campbell Lecture at Yale, part of the virtual Windham-Campbell Prize Festival that year. That lecture was the basis for Catching the Light, published in 2022 by Yale University Press in the “Why I Write” series.

Her beloved poem, Remember, was illustrated as a children’s book by Michaela Goade and received a 2024 American Indian Youth Literature Honor Award by the American Indian Library Association.

As a musician and performer, Harjo has produced seven award-winning music albums including her newest, I Pray for My Enemies. She has edited three anthologies of Native literature, including When the Light of the World was Sub­dued, Our Songs Came Through — A Nor­ton Anthol­o­gy of Native Nations Poet­ry, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, and Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, the companion anthology to her signature Poet Laureate Project Living Nations, Living Words which features a sampling of work by 47 Native Nations poets through an interactive ArcGIS Story Map and a newly developed Library of Congress audio collection.

She served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and is the first Artist-in-Residence for Tulsa’s Bob Dylan Center. She lives on the Muscogee Nation Reservation in Oklahoma. You learn much more about her remarkable career at joyharjo.com

“I turn and return to Harjo’s poetry for her breathtaking complex witness and for her world-remaking language.” —Adrienne Rich

“Throughout her extraordinary career as poet, storyteller, musician, memoirist, playwright and activist, Joy Harjo has worked to expand our American language, culture, and soul.”

–Alicia Ostriker, Wallace Stevens Award Judges Citation

“[Joy Harjo’s] work is a thrilling and necessary antidote to false news, the ephemera of digital celebrity, and other derelictions. It pushes vigorously back against forgetfulness, injustice, and negligence at every level of contemporary life. Her work moves us because it is in the continual motion of bringing forward, with grace but also acuity, our collective story, always in progress.” –Don Share

Candace Nadon, PhD is an Associate Professor of English, John F. Reed Honors Program Coordinator, and Coordinator of Academic and Creative Enrichment at Fort Lewis College in Durango, CO. She is also a Lecturer in Genre Fiction in the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University. Her work explores the intersections between gender and place and her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. She is currently writing a Colorado-based thriller. Her work explores the intersections between gender and place. Candace lives in Durango, CO and loves adventuring with her Aussie Rowan.

Raised within the four sacred mountains of Dinétah. Aspaas’s first published work was included in Yellow Medicine Review and since then his writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Diné Reader (University of Arizona Press, 2021) and Terrain.org. Aspaas’s writing revisits the destruction of sacred land and engages his readers in a dialogue about preserving Diné culture and land. He uses imagery and persona to present explorations of language, landscape, and identity. Byron is faculty at San Juan College’s English Department and Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing Program.

CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return, Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems, and the co-editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She has published poetry and nonfiction in numerous magazines, including Terrain.org, Emergence Magazine, The Ex-Puritan, Northwest Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Poetry Northwest, and various anthologies.

An award-winning columnist for the Inlander and the Director of the Elk River Writers Workshop, CMarie is the Associate Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University, where she teaches poetry and nature writing. CMarie is the host of Colorado Public Radio’s Terra Firma podcast. She is a former Idaho Writer in Residence and lives in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho.

Author’s Website:  CMarieFuhrman.com

Pamela Uschuk has eight books of poems, including Crazy Love, winner of an American Book Award and Refugee, (Red Hen Press, 2022) which was named by Orion as one of their top 14 books of poems 2022 and by Kirkus Review as one of their ten top books of 2023. Translated into more than a dozen languages, her work appears worldwide, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Agni Review, etc. Her awards include Best of the Web, 2024, Pearl S. Buck Writer-In-Residence, Randolph College, the Struga International Poetry Prize (for a theme poem), Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, and prizes from Ascent and Amnesty International.  Editor-In-Chief of Cutthroat, A Journal Of The Arts, and Black Earth Institute Fellow and Board Member, Uschuk edited the anthologies, Truth To Power:  Writers Respond To The Rhetoric Of Hate And Fear, 2017, Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, 2020, and Through the Ash, New Leaves, 2022, The Nature of Nature and Human Nature, 2023, Taking Liberties: Writers Respond to Supreme Court Decisions, the 2024 Election and war and its consequences, 2025.  She’s finishing work on a multi-genre medical memoir titled Hope’s Crazed Angels: An Odyssey Through The Whispering Disease.  Author’s Website: pamelauschuk.com

William Pitt Root is at home wandering Mt. Lemmon, Madeira Canyon, the San Juan and Weminuche Wilderness with his wolfdog Mojo Buffalo Buddy.  His 15 collections reflect a life active within and far from academia. His work appears in The New Yorker, Atlantic, Poetry and many others.  Recipient of fellowships from Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, NEA, Stanford University and US/UK Exchange Artists Program, Root’s recent books are Strange Angels and Sublime Blue, Selected Early Odes of Pablo Neruda, which he translated. Bill is one of the founders and poetry editors of Cuttroat, a Journal of the Arts.

Shannel is a Diné and Hispanic writer, student, and ADHDer from Shiprock, New Mexico. Her pronouns are she/her. She is Áshįįhí (Salt People Clan) born for Tódích’íi’nii (Bitter Water People Clan). Garcia is a student in the BFA Creative Writing Program at Diné College. She was a 2024 Diné Artisans and Authors Capacity Building Institute (DAACBI) Fellow and a 2025 AWP TCU Student Fellow. Her work can be found in Chapter House Journal and Yellow Medicine Review.

Born in Shiprock, New Mexico. Currently, resides in Farmington, NM. Ashana is Tódík’ǫ́zhí (Salt water), born for Tsi’naajinii (Black Streak Wood). After taking a year off from school, she returned to pursue an Associate of Arts degree in Surgical Technology with a focus on Liberal Arts at San Juan College. Writing, a recent hobby, has become an unexpected passion for her. Through a creative writing class and participation in writer’s events, she has found a fulfilling outlet for storytelling and personal expression. Outside of her academics, she is either spending time with her family in Aneth, UT, traveling, staying active at the gym, or hanging out with her sister.

Jalen Skye Smallcanyon is a Diné writer from Piñon and Coppermine, Arizona, within the Navajo Nation. She is Tł’ízí łání (Manygoats Clan), born for Honágháahnii (One-Who-One-Walks-Around Clan). Her maternal grandfathers are Tódich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), and her paternal grandfathers are Kinłichíí’nii (Red House Clan). She holds an AA in Diné studies and is pursuing a BFA in creative writing at Diné College. Having lived in and around the Navajo Nation her entire life, she currently resides in Tsaile, Arizona, where she continues her studies and creative work. She has recently published two poems, “Fragments of Light” and “Crimson and Juniper.”