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Levertov Award logo

portrait of Joy Harjo

photo by Matika Wilbur

The Denise Levertov Award

 

Image is delighted to announce Joy Harjo as the 2025 recipient of the Denise Levertov Award, given for lifetime achievement in arts and faith. Harjo is the 18th recipient of the award, joining recent honorees including Roward Williams, Marilyn Nelson, Carolyn Forché, and Richard Rodriguez.

An award ceremony honoring Joy Harjo will be held on Wednesday, March 5, at 7:30 p.m. at Fairfield University’s Quick Center (1073 North Benson Road, Fairfield, CT 06824-5195). This event is held in partnership with Fairfield’s MFA in Creative Writing, with support from the Fairfield University Arts Institute.

Joy Har­jo, the 23rd Poet Lau­re­ate of the Unit­ed States, is a mem­ber of the Muscogee Nation. The author of ten books of poetry, includ­ing her most recentWeav­ing Sun­down in a Scar­let Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years (2022), the high­ly acclaimed An Amer­i­can Sun­rise (2019), which was a 2020 Okla­homa Book Award Win­ner, Con­flict Res­o­lu­tion for Holy Beings (2015), which was short­list­ed for the Grif­fin Prize and named a Notable Book of the Year by the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion. In addition, her first mem­oir, Crazy Brave, was award­ed the PEN USA Lit­er­ary Award in Cre­ative Non Fic­tion and the Amer­i­can Book Award, and her sec­ondPoet War­rior: A Mem­oir, was released from W.W. Nor­ton in Fall 2021. She has also published three award-winning children’s books, and is the exec­u­tive edi­tor of the 2020 anthol­o­gy When the Light of the World was Sub­dued, Our Songs Came ThroughA Nor­ton Anthol­o­gy of Native Nations Poet­ry and the edi­tor of Liv­ing Nations, Liv­ing Words: An Anthol­o­gy of First Peo­ples Poet­ry. Har­jo’s awards and recogni­tions include the 2024 Frost Medal from the Poet­ry Soci­ety of Amer­i­ca, Yale’s 2023 Bollin­gen Prize for Amer­i­can Poet­ry, a Class of 2022 Nation­al Human­i­ties Medal, a Life­time Achieve­ment Award from Amer­i­cans for the Arts, a Ruth Lily Prize for Life­time Achieve­ment from the Poet­ry Foun­da­tion, and many others. Har­jo served as a chan­cel­lor of the Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets and as a found­ing board mem­ber and Chair of the Native Arts and Cul­tures Foun­da­tion. She has been induct­ed into the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Arts and Let­ters, the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety, the Nation­al Native Amer­i­can Hall of Fame, and the Nation­al Woman’s Hall of Fame.

“Every soul has a distinct song” writes Harjo in her 2012 memoir Crazy Brave, echoing the incarnational humanism at the heart of Image’s mission. As Alicia Ostriker wrote in her judge’s citation for the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award, Harjo’s “visionary justice-seeking art transforms personal and collective bitterness to beauty, fragmentation to wholeness, and trauma to healing.” Harjo’s work as a writer, editor, artist, and literary citizen embraces poetry as a sacred form for probing the mystery at the heart of being human, and our responsibility to one another and the world around us.

The Levertov Award is given annually to an artist, musician, or writer whose work exemplifies a serious and sustained engagement with faith. The occasion is marked by a reading or performance by the recipient. The 2025 event is cosponsored by Fairfield University's MFA in Creative Writing and generously hosted in their Quick Center for the Arts.

 

Award Ceremony & Reading

March 5, 7:30 p.m.

Fairfield University's Quick Center for the Arts

Brief book signing to follow.

Register here to attend this free event.

About Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov, who spent her last years in Seattle, embraced the landscape and culture of the Pacific Northwest. Particularly in her later poetry, her identity as a Christian believer—a pilgrim whose faith was inextricably entwined with doubt—became another important facet of her work.

Read a personal essay by Murray Bodo about Denise Levertov’s life, work, and faith, originally published in Image issue 27.

Past Levertov Award Recipients

2022 | Rowan Williams

2019 | Marilyn Nelson

2018 | Carolyn Forché

2017 | Richard Rodriguez

2016 | Dana Gioia

2015 | Bruce Cockburn

2014 | Scott Cairns

2013 | Luci Shaw

2012 | Patricia Hampl

2011 | Sam Phillips

2010 | Ron Hansen

2009 | Eugene Peterson

2008 | Thomas Lynch

2007 | Bret Lott

2006 | Kathleen Norris

2005 | Franz Wright

2004 | Madeline DeFrees

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