About this Event
The Indigenous Voices Book Club is devoted to reading and discussing books by Indigenous writers, bringing together fiction, memoir, history, poetry, and more. Each month, we'll encounter stories and perspectives that deepen our understanding of Indigenous experiences, histories, cultures, and contemporary life.
This month, we're reading When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo—a sweeping collection that gathers more than 160 poets from nearly 100 Indigenous nations into a shared history of Native poetry in North America. Organized geographically, the anthology moves across regions, nations, generations, and poetic traditions, bringing centuries-old oral and ceremonial forms into conversation with contemporary voices. There are poems of family and homeland, displacement and resistance, love and humor, grief and survival, alongside work that simply captures the strangeness and texture of ordinary life. The result isn't a single story of Indigenous poetry, but a chorus: voices distinct from one another yet connected across time and place. Expansive, surprising, and meant to be read slowly, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through is both an introduction to an extraordinary range of poets and a reminder of what the title makes beautifully clear: despite everything intended to silence them, the songs came through.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Selected as one of Oprah Winfrey's "Books That Help Me Through"
United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology.
This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries. Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prize–winner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organized sections. Each section begins with a poem from traditional oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Diné poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Luci Tapahanso, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear. When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature, without which no study of American poetry is complete.
ABOUT THE EDITOR:
Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States and is a recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s 2024 Frost Medal, Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and was recently honored with a National Humanities Medal.
Event venue & nearby stays
Bookstore1Sarasota, 117 S. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota, United States
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