Joy Harjo Discusses Cloud Runner with Tracy K. Smith

About this event

BPL Presents welcomes the three-term U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, who discusses Cloud Runner, a moving collection about grief, loss, and how art can transform suffering. Losing a child is one of the most irreconcilable griefs. In Cloud Runner, Joy Harjo reckons with the unspeakable pain of losing her daughter: “Reason has no home in this hour,” she writes. Despite a devastating loss, Harjo constructs a shrine to human resilience, reminding us that the most profound revelations can appear in our darkest hours: “I now know why we construct ceremonial epics of mystery and beauty, / Of enemy and failure: it is so we can pick up our burdens / And go on.” Harjo’s magical poems are known for weaving myth, song, and spirit. In this searing volume, her poems become essential witnesses to history, especially in our current era of compounded loss: mass shootings, missing and murdered Native women, climate disaster, and political violence. Cloud Runner explores how all grief may be connected; it is a testament to poetry’s power to speak what is unspeakable, to touch what the mind cannot carry. PARTICIPANTS 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 and is a recipient 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. Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, translator and librettist. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017-19, during which time she spearheaded American Conversations: Celebrating Poetry in Rural Communities with the Library of Congress, created the American Public Media podcast The Slowdown, and edited the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time. Smith is the author of six poetry collections: The Forest, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in March 2027; Such Color: New…

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