The Transylvania County Library’s Fall 2025 J.R. McDowell Speaker will be Joy Harjo, the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate and the first Native American to hold the position. A celebrated poet, musician, and author, Harjo has been honored with a National Humanities Medal, Yale’s Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal. Her talk will interweave poems, stories and reflections that address themes of resilience, identity, memory and our relationship with the natural world. She is widely celebrated for connecting personal history with collective experience, offering audiences a vision of art as a force for healing and renewal.

Harjo will speak on Wednesday, October 29, at 7:00 p.m. at the Porter Center at Brevard College. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., and a book signing will follow the program. Free general admission tickets will be available at the Transylvania County Library beginning Wednesday, October 1.

This program is made possible by the Transylvania County Library Foundation, with support from Brevard College.