Kettering Foundation Awards Fellowship to Joy Harjo

Yellowhawk Fellowship honors work focusing on human and democratic rights

DAYTON, Ohio, Jan. 15, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The Charles F. Kettering is awarding its Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship to Joy Harjo, internationally renowned poet, performer, and writer of the Muscogee Nation.

Harjo served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States and is the inaugural artist-in-residence of Tulsa's Bob Dylan Center. Harjo is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light; several plays, prose collections, and children's books; and two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior. She has also produced seven award-winning music albums and edited several anthologies. Her many honors include Poetry Society of America's 2024 Frost Medal, Yale's 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, a 2022 National Humanities Medal, and the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation.

The Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship is named for the late Ruth Yellowhawk (1960-2010), also known as Taho Kahwoka Win, meaning "Woman Whose Voice is in the Air," who was an Ohioan of Wyandot, Huron, and German ancestry. Yellowhawk was a community-centered radio journalist and storyteller who worked with the Kettering Foundation from 1997 to 2010. The Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship is awarded to Native American and Indigenous practitioners, community leaders, and scholars whose work focuses on human and democratic rights and carries forward the values Yellowhawk exemplified.

Harjo joins a group of distinguished named fellows and senior fellows drawn from government, higher education, journalism, and civil society, who represent the strength of both major parties and are known for their integrity and resolute commitment to democracy.

"I am honored to accept the appointment as the 2025 Yellowhawk Fellow, to continue a legacy of social awareness and democratic rights in Ruth Yellowhawk's memory," said Harjo. "This fellowship offers me the opportunity to build on a legacy of democracy with my community work in partnership with the Kettering Foundation. I consider poetry, music, writing, and social involvement as community work. I am a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and work from our reservation. It has been said that our Mvskoke councils are the longest surviving democratic institutions in the world."

"The Kettering Foundation is delighted to recognize Joy Harjo as its 2025 Yellowhawk Fellow," said Sharon L. Davies, Kettering Foundation president and CEO. "Kettering's Democracy and the Arts focus area undergirds all of our programs, and Harjo is widely known for her use of the literary and written arts to broaden thinking about the power of the self and our roles in the pursuit of social justice."

The Charles F. Kettering Foundation, headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, operating foundation rooted in the American tradition of inventive research. Founded in 1927 "to sponsor and carry out scientific research for the benefit of humanity," the foundation is inspired by the innovativeness and ingenuity of its founder, the American inventor Charles F. Kettering. For the past four decades, the foundation's research and programs have focused on the needs of democracy worldwide. Today, the organization is committing itself to advancing inclusive democracies by fostering citizen engagement, promoting government accountability, and countering authoritarianism.

Contact
Melinda Gilmore
Charles F. Kettering Foundation
Director of Communications
Cell: 937.260.8584
[email protected] 

SOURCE Charles F. Kettering Foundation