Oumark Allen Everett News Today

When Rilla Askew first read one of Joy Harjo’s poems in 1989 as she sat in a motel in St. Louis, she was stunned by the power of her words.  “I just kind of fell back on the bed,” Askew said. “I was so knocked out by the power of it, by the beauty of it, by the pain, and by the honesty and by the things that I recognized that were so particularly Oklahoma and so particularly Native.”  Harjo’s poems, which were featured in “Oklahoma Indian Markings,”...