A Ritual of Remembrance: Joy Harjo on the Aftermath of Her Mother’s Death
From Dana Tiger’s Illustrated Adaptation of the Poem, “Washing My Mother’s Body”
The following is from Washing My Mother’s Body: A Ceremony for Grief by Joy Harjo, illustrated by Dana Tiger.
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Reprinted with permission from Washing My Mother’s Body: A Ceremony for Grief by Joy Harjo. Art by Dana Tiger. Introduction copyright © 2025 by Joy Harjo-Sapulpa. Art and artist’s statement copyright © 2025 by Dana Tiger. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
“Washing My Mother’s Body” from An American Sunrise: Poems by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 2019 by Joy Harjo. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo served three terms as the twenty-third Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019 to 2022. She is the author of several poetry collections, plays, children’s books, and memoirs, as well as the editor of multiple anthologies of Native poetry. She has also produced several recordings of original music. Harjo has been honored with the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal, Yale University’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, among many other accolades. She also holds honorary doctorates from multiple universities, including Harvard University, the University of St Andrews, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the first artist-in-residence at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is a Muscogee Nation–enrolled citizen and lives in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation reservation in Oklahoma.
