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Natalie Diaz was born on 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 (Akimel O'odham). Diaz is the author of Postcolonial Love Poem, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, finalist for the National Book Award, Forward Prize in Poetry and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of a Publishing Triangle Award. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was winner of an American Book Award. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellow, a Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellow and a former Princeton University Hodder Fellow. She was awarded the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize. Diaz is Founding Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, where she is a Professor in the English MFA program. In 2021, Diaz was elected the youngest ever Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Diaz splits here time between her homelands in Phoenix, Arizona and along the waterways of Manahatta in New York. She was recently awarded a 2023 and 2024 Mellon Foundation Research Residency Fellowship, an inaugural Baldwin-Emerson Shining Light Fellowship, a 2024 Margaret Casey Foundation Freedom Fellow, and also served as the Yale Rosenkranz Writer in Residence in 2024 and 2025. She is currently a Senior Fellow at The New School Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy. |
