If you have ever been in the enviable position of considering the difference between happiness and joy, you might find yourself nodding when the latter is characterized as being wilder and more ...

In his new anthology, Joy: 100 Poems, the writer Christian Wiman takes readers through the ostensible ordinariness of life and reveals the extraordinary. “We ate, and talked, and went to bed, / And ...

Finally tonight: some words to celebrate what millions will be doing tomorrow, gathering around the table to eat, talk, give thanks, and be together. They come from poet Joy Harjo, a member of the ...

William Butler Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is about the allure of an imagined refuge. The poem’s distressed urban speaker fantasizes about fleeing the city and retreating to an idyllic Irish ...

The daughter of a Native American father and a mother both Native American and white, poet Joy Harjo knew early the pain caused by prejudice. “I started writing to save my life,” she says. It was a ...

In the church where I was raised, adults made a sharp distinction between joy and happiness. Happiness felt good, but it was temporary, and because it was temporary, there was something about it not ...

For a man who was told he’d never be successful, my friend William Sherrill has done well. He’s not rich or famous. He doesn’t head an important company or have a mansion on a hill. He is an Air Force ...

“The author is dead!” has been a consistent postmodernist refrain discouraging readers from reducing meanings of literary works to mere biographical outlines of their authors. Joy Ladin’s ...

I started a Joy Harjo reading jag the summer before last in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at op. cit., a magical store in whose forest of books, new and older, I picked up her 2012 memoir, Crazy Brave. I knew ...