Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age 

Joy Harjo  

W.W. Norton, 2025 

Hardcover: $21.99 

Genre: Memoir  

 

For A Girl Becoming  

Joy Harjo with illustrations by Adriana Garcia  

Norton Young Editions, 2025 

Hardcover: $18.99 

Genre: Children’s poetry  

 

Washing My Mother’s Body: A Ceremony for Grief  

Joy Harjo with illustrations by Dana Tiger  

Ten Speed Press, 2025 

Hardcover: $17.99 

Genre: Poetry  

 

Reviewed by Pam Kingsbury  

Joy Harjo, who was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame in March, added three book projects – For a Girl Becoming, Washing My Mother’s Body: A Ceremony for Grief, and Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age – to her impressive oeuvre in 2025. Harjo’s work, be it poetry, memoir, or a children’s book, is rooted in the ideals of creativity, empathy, and justice. 

For a Girl Becoming, originally published in 2009 and republished by Norton Young Editions with illustrations by Pura Belpre Award winner Adriana Garcia, was written to celebrate the arrival of a baby. The welcoming ceremony connects the story of the baby girl’s birth to the family and the community, where she is celebrated and cherished. Her extended family teaches her the cyclical nature of life and nature. The illustrations are vivid, lively, and charming. For a Girl Becoming is intended for young girls between the ages of four and eight and is universally appealing as a coffee table book and for gift-giving.  

“Washing My Mother’s Body: A Ceremony for Grief” was originally included in the poetry collection  An American Sunrise: Poems (published in 2019 during Harjo’s three-term appointment as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate). The poem explores the complicated relationship between a mother and a daughter, the nuances of grief after a death, and reflects on honoring her mother’s life. Ten Speed Press has republished the poem with lovely and delicate watercolor illustrations by Muscogee artist Dana Tiger.  

Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age, like Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, offers the reader homilies on learning how to live with grace and the necessity of understanding personal history.  

As a child, Harjo loved hiding under the kitchen table, listening to the women and the elders ask the great questions of life through storytelling. She heard stories filled with metaphors, told with good humor, about why humans suffer, why there is evil in the world, what humanity’s purpose is, and what happens after death.  

Now, as a great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother, and having lived long enough to be the oldest person in her family, Harjo is speaking directly to young Native women (and all readers) about her own coming of age. Using her experiences, as well as the lessons of her Muscogee ancestors and the natural world, she shares her stories about the people, places, and experiences that have shaped her as a person and a poet, memoirist, and musician in a series of fifty-one vignettes and poems.  

Girl Warrior reminds the reader of the necessary challenges the young face during adolescence, the need to find balance within a family of origin, building a web of friends and chosen family, and finding a vocation. Harjo examines how to learn to forgive, fail, start over, and honor family and community with kindness, empathy, and a strong sense of purpose. The resulting book is an uplifting and loving collection about becoming one’s best self.  

Individually and collectively, Girl Warrior, For A Girl Becoming, and Washing My Mother’s Body: A Ceremony for Grief, offer empowering images of the feminine from childhood through old age. The books are grounded in First Nation storytelling, history, and myth. Joy Harjo’s prose and free verse turn the ordinary into the sacred by reminding readers of what it means to be human at all stages of life. 

Pam Kingsbury is retired and lives in Florence, Alabama.