Joy Harjo will give a public reading as part of the Visiting Writers Series at Northern Michigan University. This free event will be held at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 5, in the Marquette Room of the University Center.

Harjo is a poet, author and musician from Tulsa, Okla. She has written eight books of poetry, including Resolutions for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems and She Had Some Horses. She is the recipient of the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. Harjo’s memoir, Crazy Brave, won several awards, including the PEN USA Literary Award. In 2014, she was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.

As a renowned saxophonist, Harjo has played nationally and internationally both solo and with her band, The Arrow Dynamics. She has five award-winning CD’s including Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears and Winding Through the Milky Way. In 2009, she won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year. She is a professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.