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 recent, Weaving 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 second, Poet 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 Through — A 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.
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.