Natalie Diaz
“My body is its own lexicon and I also fight for a language, in Mojave and English, that helps me to hold it in the space of love.”
Natalie Diaz
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“Diaz’s collection is no doubt one of the most important poetry releases in years, one to applaud for its considerable demonstration of skill, its resistance to dominant perspectives and its light wrought of desire.”
“The representation of violence against Native peoples is a driving engine of [Postcolonial Love Poem]. Whether it be historical or present violence against the general Native population and culture, the specific violence levied at girls and women, the violence of the Christian religion, the cyclical violence the male body engages in, a violence — sometimes loud cacophony, sometimes mute ghost — saturates these pages. . . . In the very present absence of the Mojave language, Postcolonial Love Poem becomes a very present love poem to self and community, post colonialism.”
“This debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life. In darkly humorous poems, Diaz illuminates far corners of the heart.”
“In her first collection… Natalie Diaz writes with heartfelt grandeur—and occasional needling wit.”
Natalie Diaz was born and raised 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 Tribe. She is the author of two poetry collections, Post-Colonial Love Poem (Graywolf, 2020), winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, and When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press 2012). She has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Mellon Fellowships, a USA fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, a New School Fellowship and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship. She has also been the Rosenkranz Visiting Writer at Yale. Her work has widely translated, including into Spanish, French, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Polish and Slovenian.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Book Review, she was asked how she uses form in her poetry: “Some of it is about space, but it’s also about the language that I’m bringing and how it feels physically in my body, and also how it feels to speak it out in a physical way. We tend to let the page dominate what happens — even the fact that we have this 8.5-by-11-inch page that we tend to write on in our private writing before it makes it to a book. For me, it really is a combination of what is happening visually in a line. I don’t mean necessarily from left to right. I tend to see and sense things in the periphery. I think some of that is because I had played basketball all of my life, even from when I was young, so I learned to not just rely on my eyes for that sense. I think some of it is also having grown up in the desert and a certain kind of precarity where you always want to know what is around you. Sometimes what is around you is more important than what’s in front of you. So form for me is happening in a nonlinear way. When I read a page of poetry or prose, I am reading the line where my eyes are sliding across, but I’m also seeing all the other words happening on the page.”
Diaz earned a BA from Old Dominion University, where she received a full athletic scholarship. Diaz played professional basketball in Europe and Asia before returning to Old Dominion to earn an MFA. She is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University where she directs ASU’s Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.
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Postcolonial Love Poem
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When My Brother Was An Aztec
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