Natalie Diaz

Natalie Diaz (born September 4, 1978, Fort Mojave Indian Village, Needles, California, U.S.) is an American poet who won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Postcolonial Love Poem (2020). She is also a Native language activist working to revitalize the Mojave language.

Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village, on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation, which overlays the borders of California, Arizona, and Nevada. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community of the Akimel O’odham (Pima). Diaz is one of 11 children born to Richard and Bernadette Diaz. Growing up, she was exposed to the diverse language and cultural traditions of her family’s background, which included Spanish and Mexican culture from her father’s side and Mojave from her mother’s side. Diaz was raised Roman Catholic, though in a 2020 interview with The Rumpus, she described her faith as “not the Catholicism that most people would recognize. It’s rezzed out. It’s jalopy.”

Diaz played basketball in high school and attended Old Dominion University in Virginia on a full athletic scholarship. She played point guard for the Lady Monarchs, the women’s basketball team, and during her freshman year the team reached the NCAA tournament’s Final Four. Her senior year Diaz was named Old Dominion’s Female Athlete of the Year. After graduating in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in English and women’s studies, she played professional basketball in Asia and Europe. However, a knee injury ended her basketball career, after which she returned to Old Dominion to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry and fiction in 2007.

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Diaz had early success publishing poems in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, The Iowa Review, and Narrative. Some notable themes that emerged early on in her poetry were family and the harsh realities of life on the reservation. In addition, she frequently draws upon imagery from Catholicism and Native culture and mythology. In 2012 she published her first poetry collection, called When My Brother Was an Aztec. The collection told the story of a sister grieving her brother’s descent into methamphetamine addiction. It received high praise for its contrasting lyrical language and dark, poignant humor and won the 2013 American Book Award.

Diaz’s influences range from Greek poet Homer’s epic works, the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the fiction and poetry of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Her poetry also contains references to the work of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, and she has cited American poet Joy Harjo as a major influence, stating in an interview with Harjo in 2015 that “much of what other Native writers do is in large part due to what Joy has done and continues to do on the page.”

Sports has also been at the forefront of Diaz’s writing. In “A Body of Athletics,” an essay that was first published in Prairie Schooner in 2015, she draws connections between poetry and sports, such as American rapper Tupac Shakur’s performance in the basketball film Above the Rim (1994) and American poet Jim Carroll’s autobiography of his teenage basketball career, The Basketball Diaries (1978). The essay then dives into an examination of her personal experience with sports injuries, which is interwoven with passages on the bodily abuse inflicted on Black and Native professional athletes (in particular, gridiron football players Robert Griffin III and Jim Thorpe) and the police violence inflicted on Black and Native citizens.

After graduate school and years of living away from the Mojave reservation, Diaz returned to her home community and found that the Mojave language was endangered. She received grants to learn the language and to build a revitalization program, working with several Mojave elders who were fluent in the language. She eventually became director of the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program and began to advocate widely for the revitalization and preservation of Native languages. In recognition of this work and her poetry, she received a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship in 2013.

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In 2018 Diaz was awarded a fellowship by the MacArthur Foundation for her poetry. Two years later she launched a collaborative initiative for Indigenous artists called the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, at Arizona State University, where she serves as a professor of creative writing. Also in 2020 she published her second poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poem. The collection melds political perspectives on the colonization and destruction of Native land with intimate meditations on queer sexuality, romantic love, and the human body. The collection was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Forward Prize for best collection and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.