WRITE ON IS PROUD TO HOST AN OFFICIAL JOY HARJO WATCH PARTY!

A SPECIAL EVENT EXCLUSIVELY FOR WRITE ON MEMBERS!

Join us and other members for a social hour followed by a watch party for the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters as they bring Joy Harjo to Wisconsin for two signature speaking events, including tonight’s performance in Madison. The program is part of the Academy’s Finding Home series and will include an event in Milwaukee in addition to tonight’s performance at the Playhouse Theater in the Overture Center for the Arts. Harjo will be Karen Lincoln Michel, a cultural consultant and story producer for PBS Wisconsin, who will serve as a moderator. Through poetry and conversation, Joy Harjo will illuminate the layered meanings of home, drawing on the themes of land, memory, ancestry, displacement and healing. 

An internationally acclaimed performer and write of the Muscogee Nation and the first Native American poet to serve as the United States Poet Laureate (2019-2022), Joy Harjo is the author of eleven books of poetry, several plays, two memoirs, as well as children’s books and other works of nonfiction. Her many honors include the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her twelfth book of poetry,  Cloud Runner, will be published by W.W. Norton in Fall of 2026. Harjo holds the Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship fom the Kettering Foundation and is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Karen Lincoln Michel is a cultural consultant and story producer for PBS Wisconsin. Previously, she served as president, CEO, and chief editorial office of IndiJ Public Media, a nonprofit news organization that covers the Indigenous world through digital, broadcast, and social media platforms. She has written extensively about Native American issues as a freelance and was a columnist for The New York Times Syndicate.

Finding Home programs explore how people respond with creativity, stewardship, and resilience. Finding Home brings people with different perspectives together to deepen understanding and identify shared values to build common ground. Through public programs, exhibitions, workshops, publications, and local partnerships, Finding Home invites reflection and participation. All events are open to the public, with hybrid and virtual options available.