The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series of Hope College will feature Joy Harjo and Danielle Cadena Deulen on Thursday, Nov. 15, at 7 p.m. at the Knickerbocker Theatre in downtown Holland.
The public is welcome. Admission is free.
Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Okla., and is a member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation. Her seven books of poetry include “She Had Some Horses,” “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky,” and “How We Became Human, New and Selected Poems.” Her poetry has garnered many awards, including a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award; the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas; and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has released three award-winning CDs of original music and performances: “Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century,” “Native Joy for Real” and “She Had Some Horses.” A song from her forthcoming CD, “Winding Through the Milky Way,” just won a New Mexico Music Award. She has received the Eagle Spirit Achievement Award for overall contributions in the arts from the American Indian Film Festival, and a U.S. Artists Fellowship for 2009. She co-wrote the signature film of the National Museum of the American Indian, “A Thousand Roads.” She is a founding board member of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. Harjo writes a column, “Comings and Goings,” for her tribal newspaper, the “Muscogee Nation News.” She lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, and Albuquerque, N.M.
Danielle Cadena Deulen is a poet and essayist. Her collection of poems, “Lovely Asunder,” won the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize and was published with the University of Arkansas Press in 2011. Her memoir, “The Riots,” published with University of Georgia Press in 2011, won the 2010 AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction, was a finalist for the 2011 Grub Street National Book Prize in Nonfiction, and won the 2012 GLCA New Writers Award. Formerly, she was a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her poetry and essays have appeared in journals such as “The Utne Reader,” “The Missouri Review,” “The Iowa Review,” “Smartish Pace” and “The Indiana Review.” She received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and her Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah. She currently lives in Ohio, where she is an assistant professor of poetry in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati.
Additional information is available online at hope.edu/vws.
The Knickerbocker Theatre is located at 86 E. Eighth St.