Joy Harjo: Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship
“I am honored to accept the appointment as the 2025 Yellowhawk Fellow, to continue a legacy of social awareness and democratic rights in Ruth Yellowhawk’s memory,” said Harjo. “This fellowship offers me the opportunity to build on a legacy of democracy with my community work in partnership with the Kettering Foundation. I consider poetry, music, writing, and social involvement as community work. I am a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and work from our reservation. It has been said that our Mvskoke councils are the longest surviving democratic institutions in the world.”
In January 2025, the Kettering Foundation awarded its Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship to Joy Harjo, internationally renowned poet, performer, and writer of the Muscogee Nation. Harjo served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States and is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence for Tulsa’s Bob Dylan Center.
Harjo is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light; several plays, prose collections and children’s books; and two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior. She has also produced seven award-winning music albums and edited several anthologies. Her many honors include Poetry Society of America’s 2024 Frost Medal, Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, a 2022 National Humanities Medal, and the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, among others. She served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation. She lives on the Muscogee Nation Reservation in Oklahoma.
Learn more about Harjo’s work:
The Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship is awarded to Native American and Indigenous practitioners, community leaders, and scholars whose work focuses on human and democratic rights and carries forward the values Yellowhawk exemplified. The fellowship was established in 2010, and past recipients include Jim Yellowhawk and Harley Eagle. Recipients of the Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship are selected by the president of the Kettering Foundation. Learn more about all of our Kettering fellows.
