Natalie Diaz

Natalie Diaz

Natalie Diaz is a Mojave American poet, language activist, and educator. She is enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community.

Early life

Natalie Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the border of California, Arizona, and Nevada. She attended Old Dominion University where she played point guard on the women’s basketball team, reaching the NCAA Final Four as a freshman and the bracket of sixteen her other three years. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia, she returned to Old Dominion University, and completed an MFA in poetry and fiction,^[2] in 2007.

Career

Her work appeared in Narrative,^[3] Poetry magazine,^[4] Drunken Boat,^[5] Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, and Crab Orchard Review.^[6]

Diaz's debut book of poetry, When My Brother Was an Aztec,^[7] was a 2012 Lannan Literary Selection,^[8] a 2013 PEN/Open Book Award^[9] shortlist, and “portrays experiences rooted in Native American life with personal and mythic power.”^[10] One important focus of the book is a brother’s addiction to crystal meth.^[11]

In 2012, she was interviewed about her poetry and language rehabilitation work on the PBS News Hour.^[12]

Personal life

Diaz currently lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona where she directs a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her home reservation, and works with the last Elder speakers of the Mojave language.^[13]

Poetry

• When My Brother Was an Aztec. Copper Canyon Press. 10 October 2013. ISBN 978-1-61932-033-8. 

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Natalie Diaz.

• "One on One with Natalie Diaz". GBall. 2000.