New Work by Joy Harjo, Poet Laureate

Joy Harjo’s work has always crossed boundaries: between poem and song, personal memory and collective story, lament and invocation. As the Muscogee Nation member who served as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022, Harjo has spent decades creating form that holds witness and resilience. Her next chapter arrives in 2026 with an album on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, a natural home for an artist whose work lives as much in breath and cadence as on the page. 

This will be her first release with Folkways and a continuation of a musical practice (she is an accomplished saxophone player) that began in the 1980s; it follows 2021’s I Pray for My Enemies and extends her fusion of spoken word, jazz, improvisation, and Indigenous storytelling traditions. Harjo’s art has always been anchored in matrilineal memory and the politics of presence. Her forthcoming recording becomes part of an essential cultural archive, an addition that deepens the landscape of American sound and speaks to the stories we inherit and carry forward. folkways.si.edu

image credit: Smithsonian Folkways