Academy of American Poets has chosen Joy Harjo, who is best known for championing her Muskogee Creek background in her work, as the recipient of the Wallace Stevens award and the $100,000 prize for lifetime achievement for her "proven mastery" and ""visionary justice-seeking art," as quoted by The Guardian.

"Throughout her extraordinary career as poet, storyteller, musician, memoirist, playwright and activist, Joy Harjo has worked to expand our American language, culture and soul," Academy of American Poets Chancellor Alicia Ostriker said in a statement posted on the organization's official website.

Ostriker mentions Harjo's territory being "the natural world, in earth, especially the landscape of the American Southwest-and in the spirit world," which when she combines with "Native traditions of prayer and myth" creates "collective bitterness to beauty, fragmentation to wholeness, and trauma to healing."

In an interview with Indian Country, Harjo admitted that she is still "stunned" over her Wallace Stevens award win. She adds that she is "deeply moved and honored" to have been an instrument in opening the threshold for other "Native writers, poets and women" like her to such opportunities, emphasizing that not many of them are being recognized.

Harjo has a lot of people she wants to dedicate the prestigious recognition. "It's for my Mom, my teachers, it's for the kids coming up, for the Native poets and it's for all the young writers coming up," the poet said. She then continued "Everything is poetry. It's all poetry, it's all in the words, in songs, in lyrics. My Mom used to write songs. Poetry is like singing to me. Even on paper."

WS Merwin and Adrienne Rich are among the previous recipients of the Wallace Stevens award. In the ceremony, Kathryn Nuernberger's work "The End of Pink" was hailed the second best book of poetry, winning the author $1,000 prize while Blake N. Campbell also collected the same amount of prize for his writing "Bioluminescence" being declared the winner of the student poetry award.

Academy of American Poets also awarded Kevin Young the Lenore Marshall poetry award along with $25,000 prize for his work "Book of Hours." Marie Howe received the $25,000 fellowship. Todd Portnowitz also got $25,000 and a five-week residency at the American Academy in Rome for his translation of "Go Tell It to the Emperor" by Italian poet Pierluigi Cappello while Roger Greenwald's English translation of "Guarding the Air" by Swedish poet Gunnar Harding won him $1000.