The Poetics and Politics of Water, a series curated by the American Indian Studies Program and the Department of English at the UA, presents Natalie Diaz, who will read from her work. After the reading there will be a short Q&A session and a book signing.
Natalie Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for several years, she completed her MFA in poetry and fiction at Old Dominion University. She was awarded the 2012 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship, a 2012 Lannan Residency, as well as being awarded a 2012 Lannan Literary Fellowship and the 2014 Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She currently lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, and directs a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her home reservation. There she works and teaches with the last Elder speakers of the Mojave language.