Joy Harjo, a Muscogee (Creek) Nation poet born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2019 — the first Native American to hold the position — and was subsequently reappointed for two further terms through 2022. Harjo's poetry, including her celebrated collection An American Sunrise, centred the Indigenous female body and its history of colonial violence, forced dress, and physical dispossession alongside the spiritual and creative resilience of Native women. Her appointment brought an entirely new dimension of embodied feminist poetry to the country's most prominent literary platform.

Harjo's work connects the history of bodily constraint — including the forcible imposition of European dress, including corsets, on Indigenous women in mission and boarding school settings — to the broader history of colonialism and cultural erasure. Her poetry of the body is both political and sacred, drawing on Muscogee traditions to resist the Eurocentric ideal of femininity that the corset symbolised. Her Laureateship established that American feminist body poetry had to address race and colonialism as well as gender.