“I will use words to call my spirit back.”

— Joy Harjo

“I have no doubt poetry is the best caretaker of my soul that I ever found.”

— Noel Beitler

“Along the way, the life of poetry exposed itself as a life of spirit.”

— Mark Nepo

“I've had many wounds to heal, and I've done much writing to heal them, and in the process I've discovered a rich, deeply textured life I hadn't before recognized."

— Louise DeSalvo,

Writing as a Way of Healing:How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives

"I do not know when the first poem was, where it came from, or exactly how. I just know how much I needed it: the scrawl, the questioning, the words lining up in a musical sound sense to make some thing from the everything of nothing. I was in the dark and decided to investigate the dark to find the light."

— Joy Harjo