Internationally Acclaimed Native American and Maori Poets Present Evening Reading at UH Manoa

Joy Harjo and Robert Sullivan present an evening reading on Tuesday, September 30

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Contact:
Cristina Bacchilega, (808) 956-7619
Department of English
Kristen Cabral, (808) 956-5039
Public Information Officer
Posted: Sep 22, 2003

Joy Harjo, an internationally acclaimed Native American poet and Fall 2003 Distinguished Visiting Writer of the UH Mānoa Department of English, and Robert Sullivan, a Maori poet and UH Mānoa faculty member who teaches creative writing and Pacific literature, will present an evening reading of their works on Tuesday, September 30. Co-sponsored by the UH Mānoa Department of English and the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, the event will be held at 7 p.m. in the Art Auditorium on the UH Mānoa campus.

Acclaimed poet, musician, editor, and performer, Harjo (Muscogee/Tallahassee Wakokaye Grounds) is the author of numerous books including "She Had Some Horses," "In Mad Love and War," and "How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems" (Norton). She has received several awards for her writing, including the 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN, 2001 American Indian Festival of Words Author Award from the Tulsa City County Library, the 2000 Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader‘s Digest Writers Award, 1997 New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers, Circle of the Americas.

Robert Sullivan, Maori poet, graphic novelist, and author of "Weaving Earth and Sky," "Jazz Waiata," and "Captain Cook in the Underworld," joined the faculty of the Department of English at UH Mānoa this semester. His children‘s book, "Weaving Earth and Sky," won the New Zealand Post Children‘s Book of the Year award. With Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri, he is the co-editor of the first anthology of contemporary indigenous Polynesian poetry in English edited by Polynesians, "Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English" (2003).

For more information about the evening reading, contact the UH Mānoa Department of English at (808) 956-7619.