Miriam Herrera on Native American Authors Video
Miriam Herrera on Native American Authors.Miriam Herrera on Native American Authors - you
As part of honoring these poetry luminaries—three visionaries representing barrier breakage in their page, stage, and community work—Crystal AC Salas, third-year MFA student at UCR, interviewed each laureate over phone and Zoom in commemoration of the occasion. To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of National Poetry Month , in this last of the series of conversations with three US Poets Laureate, Joy Harjo discusses her digital map project, how Native people have been disappeared, and answers the question, What can poetry do? Crystal AC Salas: Who would you say are your ancestors in your legacy of poet as ambassador, community organizer, and activist? How are these ancestors present in your work with the public? Joy Harjo: June Jordan is a poet whose scope and presence encompasses all those terms. Her activism was always the bedrock of any utterance from her, whether it was poetry or personal essay—her essays are wonderful. I remember when she started that Poetry for the People project—a project that shifted poetry from behind doors in the university to more of an open-door policy, so that poetry had its proper place in the community. She was brave and courageous and understood that poetry is essentially the lifeblood of people, of cultures. She went about in her work with the Poetry for the People project, too, to return poetry to the people in a way that it is present and living and moving about in countries all over the world. Of course, there are many other ancestors with quite a reach in generation, culture, and country.
She was born in Sutherland, Nebraskawhere her parents had been working in the sugar-beet fields.
She was raised in Aurora, Illinoiswhere her parents moved to escape a migratory life of farm work. Herrera began writing poetry as a grade school student when she met Gwendolyn Brooksformer Poet Laureate of Illinois, and heard her read her poetry at Herrera's elementary school.
Currently she is a member of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies and serves as the poetry editor for their journal, HaLapid. These converts to Catholicism escaped the Spanish Inquisition for the New World where they intermarried with the indigenous peoples and old Christians who populated the American Southwest. Her poetry Miriam Herrera on Native American Authors, Kaddish for Columbus explores the enigma of these divergent identities and landscapes the poet inhabits: "Mythic borders appear in the poems as a metaphor for life that are found Authorx physical space—the borders between peoples, ideas, religions, click here between science and spirit, between self; how identities are transformed when one side collides with another; how the poet, a descendant of both Columbus and Native Americans, reconciles ambiguity.]
Bravo, remarkable phrase and is duly