Harjo attended high school at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, graduating in 1968. She walked four blocks to the Indian hospital in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, to give birth to her son, Phil Dayn, when she was seventeen; her daughter, Rainy Dawn, was born four years later in Albuquerque. Between the children's births Harjo worked as a waitress, a service-station attendant, and a nursing assistant; cleaned hospital rooms; and led a health-spa dance class. She completed a B.A. in English at the University of New Mexico in 1976 and an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Iowa in 1978. She taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in 1978-1979 and at Arizona State University in 1980-1981, studied filmmaking at the Anthropology Film Center in Santa Fe in 1982, and taught at the University of Montana in 1985, the University of Colorado in 1985-1988, and the University of Arizona in 1988-1990. Since 1991 she has taught at the University of New Mexico. She has served as a contributing editor of Contact II and Tyuony and as poetry editor of High Planes Literary Review; she has also served on the boards of directors of the National Association for Third World Writers and the Native American Public Broadcasting Consortium and on the policy panel for the National Endowment for the Arts.
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