Influenced by the works of Flannery O'Connor, Simon Ortiz, Pablo Neruda, and Leslie Marmon Silko, Harjo began publishing in feminist journals, including Conditions, and in the anthologies The Third Woman (1980) and That's What She Said (1984). Her early work in The Last Song (1975), What Moon Drove Me to This? (1980), and She Had Some Horses (1983) ponders the place of women in a blended Anglo-native world. She rose above the "native poet" label with In Mad Love and War (1990), an examination of the vengeance unleashed by failed romance. Her feminism enhanced two cinema scripts, Origin of Apache Crown Dance (1985) and The Beginning. In 1994, she produced "The Flood," a mythic prose poem that links her coming of age to the "watermonster, the snake who lived at the bottom of the lake."
At the end of the twentieth century, while retaining her focus on gender and ethnic disparity, Harjo turned to universal themes. The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1996), a volume of prose poetry, pairs creation and destruction. She juxtaposed benevolent native female voices in an anthology, Reinventing Ourselves in the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writing of North America (1997). In addition, she edits High Plains Literary Review, Contact II, and Tyuonyi. Her honoraria include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Arizona Commission on the Arts, a first place from the Santa Fe Festival for the Arts, American Indian Distinguished Achievement award, and a Josephine Miles award.
