Before we share info about this month’s book, we want to recognize that this month’s “Community Kindness Sponsor” (which helps offset the cost of the extra 20 books we hide after scavenger hunt weekend every month – the “random act of kindness” books) is our friends at the University of Arizona Poetry Center! We are so grateful for their support in creating a bookish community rooted in kindness, so please send some gratitude their way!
Do you know someone who might be interested in partnering with us as a Community Kindness Sponsor in 2026 ($250)? We still have TWO months available for sponsors in 2026. Please send us an email (tucsontomegnome[at]gmail.com), and we can send you some information 🙂
AND NOW, for what you’ve been waiting for: all about this month’s hidden book!
About the book, from W.W. Norton & Company:
“To know ourselves is the most profound and difficult endeavor. Though we are all made of the same questions, we have individual routes to the answers, or to reframing the questions. Why is there evil in the world? Why do people suffer, and some more than others? Why are we here? What are we doing here? What happens after death? Does anything mean anything at all? Who am I and what does it matter?” writes Joy Harjo, renowned poet and activist, in this profound work about the struggles, challenges, and joys of coming of age.
In her best-selling memoir Poet Warrior, Harjo led readers through her lifelong process of artistic evolution. In Girl Warrior, she speaks directly to Native girls and women, sharing stories about her own coming of age to bring renewed attention to the pivotal moments of becoming including forgiveness, failure, falling, rising up, and honoring our vast family of beings.
Informed by her own experiences and those of her ancestors, Harjo offers inspiration and insight for navigating the many challenges of maturation. She grapples with parents, friendships, love, and loss. She guides young readers toward painting, poetry, and music as powerful tools for developing their own ethical sensibility. As Harjo demonstrates, the act of making is an essential part of who we are, a means of inviting the past into the present and a critical tool young women can use to shape a more just future. Lyrical and compassionate, Harjo’s call for creativity and empathy is an urgent and necessary work.”
About the author, Joy Harjo:
“Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned poet, performer, and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She served as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019 – 2022.
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she left home to attend high school at the innovative Institute of American Indian Arts, which was then a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. Harjo began writing poetry as a member of the University of New Mexico’s Native student organization, the Kiva Club, in response to Native empowerment movements. She went on to earn her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teach English, Creative Writing, and American Indian Studies at University of California-Los Angeles, University of New Mexico, University of Arizona, Arizona State, University of Illinois, University of Colorado, University of Hawai’i, Institute of American Indian Arts, and University of Tennessee, while performing music and poetry nationally and internationally.
Harjo is the author of eleven 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, and In Mad Love and War (1990), which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. 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 is 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, the companion anthology to her signature Poet Laureate project featuring a sampling of work by 47 Native Nations poets through an interactive ArcGIS Story Map and a newly developed Library of Congress audio collection.
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, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, a PEN USA Literary Award, the Poets & Writers Jackson Poetry Prize, two NEA fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. Her poetry is included on a plaque on LUCY, a NASA spacecraft launched in Fall 2021 and the first reconnaissance of the Jupiter Trojans.
Harjo performs with her saxophone and flutes, solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynamics Band, and previously with Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice. She/they have toured across the U.S. and in Europe, South America, India, Africa, and Canada. Harjo has produced seven award-winning music albums including Winding Through the Milky Way, for which she was awarded a NAMMY for Best Female Artist of the year. Her newest album, Insomnia and the Seven Steps to Grace, co-produced with esperanza spaulding, will be released Spring 2026 from Folkways.
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 Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Native American Hall of Fame, and the National Woman’s Hall of Fame.
Harjo holds the Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship from the Kettering Foundation, and is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She lives on the Muscogee Nation Reservation in Oklahoma.”
Why I selected Girl Warrior for the April 2026 Giveaway:
- As you all know, April is National Poetry Month, and I wanted to share a book by a poet whose voice moves beautifully between poetry and prose. Although this isn’t a poetry collection in the traditional sense (it does include some previously published poems throughout), Joy Harjo brings her poetic sensibilities to her storytelling, making each page feel both grounded and luminous.
- This is a book that sees life as one unfolding story. Harjo reflects on her experiences as moments of growth and transformation, inviting readers to consider their own lives as stories still being written. It’s not too late to do that thing you feel inspired to do!
- Her deep sense of connection between events, times in her life, places, and people is something I admire and want to share. Family, memory, the natural world (wind, plants, places), all are woven together, reminding us that we belong to the world around us.
- The structure of this book, framed as short essays and memories from her life, feels intimate and accessible. Each chapter offers a brief glimpse into a formative moment in Joy Harjo’s life; this is an easy one to read start to finish, or to pick up and read in bits and pieces.
- Her writing is elegant without being distant. There’s a clarity and openness that welcomes all kinds of readers, whether you read poetry often or are just beginning to explore it.
Tucson Tome Gnome 