Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation (Este Mvskokvlke) and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hickory Ground).

During her last year, she switched to creative writing, as she was inspired by different Native American writers including Simon J. Ortiz and Leslie Marmon Silko.

[12][13] Harjo earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1978.

[17] Harjo performs now with her saxophone and flutes, solo and with pulled-together players she often calls the Arrow Dynamics Band.

[21] Harjo joined the faculty of the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in January 2013.

Her methods of continuing oral tradition include storytelling, singing, and voice inflection in order to captivate the attention of her audiences.

While reading poetry, she claims that "[she] starts not even with an image but a sound," which is indicative of her oral traditions expressed in performance.

[31][32] She has published three award-winning children's books, The Good Luck Cat, For a Girl Becoming, and Remember; a collaboration with photographer/astronomer Stephen Strom; three anthologies of writing by North American Native Nations writers; several screenplays and collections of prose interviews and essays, and three plays, including Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, A Play, which she toured as a one-woman show and was published by Wesleyan Press.

Her poetry is included on a plaque on LUCY, a NASA spacecraft launched in Fall 2021 and the first reconnaissance of the Jupiter Trojans.

From there, she became a creative writing major in college and focused on her passion of poetry after listening to Native American poets.

[34] Her most recent collection, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light (W.W. Norton 2022) celebrates Harjo's 50 years of writing poetry since her first publication.

[36] Harjo performs with her saxophone and flutes, solo and with pulled-together players she often calls the Arrow Dynamics Band.

She has performed in Europe, South America, India, and Africa, as well as for a range of North American stages, including the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, the Cultural Olympiad at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, DEF Poetry Jam, and the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington D.C.[31] She began to play the saxophone at the age of 40.

Harjo believes that when reading her poems, she can add music by playing the sax and reach the heart of the listener in a different way.

[37] In addition to her creative writing, Harjo has written and spoken about US political and Native American affairs.

Scholar Mishuana Goeman writes, "The rich intertextuality of Harjo's poems and her intense connections with other and awareness of Native issues- such as sovereignty, racial formation, and social conditions- provide the foundation for unpacking and linking the function of settler colonial structures within newly arranged global spaces".

Her activism for Native American rights and feminism stem from her belief in unity and the lack of separation among human, animal, plant, sky, and earth.

She believes that colonialism led to Native American women being oppressed within their own communities, and she works to encourage more political equality between the sexes.

Layli Long Soldier's poems emerge from fields of Lakota history where centuries stack and bleed through making new songs.

"[44] In 1967 at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Harjo met fellow student Phil Wilmon, with whom she had a son.