Songlines: Following Joy Harjo’s Musical Routes

Muskogee poet and musician Joy Harjo plays with many forms of song, blues, and jazz to imagine pathways through time, across space, and towards new futures. This talk considers how Harjo’s musical sources -- from the jazz beats of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry to the soaring improvisations of Charlie Parker’s saxophone and the rhythms of Muskogee stomp dance – inspire her to create patterns of call and response, as well as dynamic layers of sound, story, and imagery.

Biography:
A professor in the English Department at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Audrey Goodman is the author of two books on the literary history of the U.S. Southwest and Greater Mexico: Translating Southwestern Landscapes and Lost Homelands (University of Arizona Press). Her research explores how textual and visual forms express cultural identities, tell stories of displacement and belonging, disrupt colonial geographies, and articulate environmental knowledge in the U.S. West. A former fellow at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, she is currently completing “A Planetary Lens: The Photo-poetics of Western Women’s Writing,” a book that focuses on the interplay between text and image in work by Joan Myers, Meridel Rubenstein, Joan Didion, Sandra Cisneros, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Joy Harjo.