Crazy Brave Review

Elizabeth Wilkinson reviews Joy Harjo's new memoir, Crazy Brave, in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Joy Harjo, Native American performance poet and musician visits Albany today.

"Readers familiar with Joy Harjo's poetry, or, better, who have experienced her live performances, will recognize a familiar cadence and overarching mythic quality in the voice she creates for her newest work, Crazy Brave. In a memoir steeped in her Mvskoke (also known as Muscogee) worldview, Harjo relates narratives of abuse, persistence and reclamation that tap into universal human emotions. Harjo's text resonates for and with readers, whether longtime fans or not; as she asserts, 'A story matrix connects all of us.'"

Read more: http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/161501475.html?vi_adid=W

More about the Writers Institute events:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/harjo_joy12.html

You are invited to attend a free catered reception with Harjo, sponsored by SUNY Press, after the evening event at approximately 9:30 p.m.

Joy Harjo, Native American poet and musician
November 1 (Thursday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Campus Center Room 375, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Campus Center Room 375, Uptown Campus

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Joy Harjo coming Thursday

“Joy Harjo is a giant-hearted, gorgeous, and glorious gift to the world. Her belief in art, in spirit, is so powerful, it can’t help but spill over to us — lucky readers. Wildly passionate and honest as a hound, Crazy Brave invites us into a whole new way of seeing—deeper, less cluttered, and vastly more courageous than our own. It’s a book for people who want to re-fall in love with the world.”-- Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness

Joy Harjo, Native American poet and musician
November 1 (Thursday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Campus Center Room 375, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Campus Center Room 375, Uptown Campus

Joy Harjo is an award-winning poet and musician of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. The author of seven collections of poetry, she was praised by the late Adrienne Rich for her “breathtaking complex witness and world-remaking language.” Her poetry collections include How We Became Human (2002), The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994), and In Mad Love and War (1990), which received the American Book Award and the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. Her new book is the memoir, Crazy Brave (2012), about her journey from a troubled childhood and teenage motherhood to her accomplishments in the arts.

Cosponsored by SUNY Press in conjunction with the annual John G. Neihardt Lecture

Read more: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/harjo_joy12.html

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Mentors Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives

"A mesmerizing book of essays by famous pens who themselves were once helped -- or hurt -- by established talents as they tried to climb their way up the literary ladder. [Mentors, Muses & Monsters] beautifully captures the experience of being a literary aspirant -- wide-eyed, enchanted by words, and eager for the tutelage of a mentor -- one who's already scaled the temple wall and emerged, shining, in a turret." -- The Christian Science Monitor

The featured text of the Summer Young Writers Institute at Skidmore this year will be Summer Institute faculty member Elizabeth Benedict's Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, reissued in a new paperback edition by SUNY Press in February 2012.

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