Good Trouble Reading Group: Poems by Joy Harjo

Join Dr. Andrea Liss for our next Good Trouble Reading Group. We’ll be discussing a selection of poems by Joy Harjo. A citizen of the Muscogee Nation, Harjo began writing poetry in the early 1970s, inspired by the takeover at Wounded Knee and the long-overdue rejuvenation of indigenous cultures through poetry and music. Her poems raise questions of identity, justice, and community and search for answers with compassion, love, and sustaining grace. Harjo has won many awards, including the Arrell Gibson Award for Lifetime Achievement and Yale’s Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and from 2019 to 2022, she served as the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States. "To read the poetry of Joy Harjo is to hear the voice of the earth, to see the landscape of time and timelessness, and, most importantly, to get a glimpse of people who struggle to understand, to know themselves, and to survive"—Poetry Foundation.

The Good Trouble Reading Group shares books that engage themes of social justice with love and family at their core. Our group leader, Dr. Andrea Liss, is Professor Emerita of Visual Culture and Cultural Theory at California State University San Marcos and a local Echo Park resident. Her teaching and research focus on artwork, photography, and poetry that connect deeply with historical events and their echoes today in the fight for justice.