A New Anthology Edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo: “Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry”; Online Audio Collection Also Available

From the Library of Congress:

Edited by Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, “Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry” is a powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today. The new anthology is published by W. W. Norton & Company in association with the Library of Congress.

As Poet Laureate, Harjo has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project at the Library of Congress gathers the work of 47 contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry.

This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project – including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui and Layli Long Soldier, among others – to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poetry in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the themes of place and displacement with focal points of visibility, persistence, resistance and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, “that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship.”

In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than 500 living Indigenous nations. “LIVING NATIONS, LIVING WORDS” is a representative offering. The anthology will be incorporated into Harjo’s outreach as U.S. Poet Laureate during her third term.

The project also includes a new online audio collection developed by Harjo and housed in the Library’s American Folklife Center, which features the participating poets reading and discussing their original poems.

The new 222-page book is available in paperback ($15.00) from the Library of Congress Shop, https://library-of-congress-shop.myshopify.com/ and from book retailers worldwide.

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