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    A Study Guide for Joy Harjo's "Grace"
    A Study Guide for Joy Harjo's "Grace"
    A Study Guide for Joy Harjo's "Grace"
    Ebook40 pages27 minutes

    A Study Guide for Joy Harjo's "Grace"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Joy Harjo's "Grace," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535824101
    A Study Guide for Joy Harjo's "Grace"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Joy Harjo's "Grace" - Gale

      13

      Grace

      Joy Harjo

      1990

      Introduction

      Joy Harjo is part of the second generation of the Native American renaissance, a literary movement that arose in the 1960s with such distinguished writers as Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday, and Simon J. Ortiz. Of Muskogee-Creek heritage, as well as Cherokee, Irish, and French, Harjo is familiar with both Native American and European cultures. Raised in cities, with university degrees and an academic career, she has nevertheless been nurtured primarily by her Muskogee tradition, which she fully embraces.

      Harjo combines her knowledge of the visual arts, music, and language to re-vision the Native American perception of life in relevance to the present time. Her experimental poems fold the landscape of city nightlife, poverty, violence, and the bloody history of her people into the larger mythic presence of the natural landscape, with its cycles, beauty, and forgiveness. She speaks of the spiritual journey to wholeness that everyone, not only Native Americans, must make.

      Grace is a prose poem published in 1990 in Harjo's fourth collection of poems, In Mad Love and War. It describes a difficult winter she spent as a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in Iowa City in the late 1970s. She and her Native American friends in the program felt out of place except for during certain moments of grace when they could access their Native identities. As a poet, Harjo is noted for her direct, deep emotion and lack of irony. She does not describe as much as she evokes, with words, rhythm, and images that derive from a sense of ceremony. Besides her own prolific artistic output in stories, poems, music, and film writing, Harjo has contributed much to promoting Native culture, through her organizational work, editing, and anthologizing of other Native American women writers. Grace can also be found in Harjo's collection How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2001.

      Author Biography

      Joy Foster was born on May 9, 1951, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Allen and Wynema Baker Foster. Her father was a full-blooded Muskogee (part of the Creek confederacy), and her mother was Cherokee, French, and Irish. Her father was a construction worker who died of asbestoscaused lung disease. Her mother worked as a waitress and cook in truck stops. In 1970, Joy Foster took the

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