May 29, 2020

Native American Poet and Activist Natalie Diaz at ECU

October 2nd, 7 pm | Jenkins Fine Arts Center, Room 1220

ECU’s Contemporary Writers Series presents Native American poet and activist Natalie Diaz, author of When My Brother Was an Aztec a 2012 Lannan Literary Selection. Diaz will read from her work at the Jenkins Fine Arts Center on Tuesday evening, October 2nd at 7:00 pm. Adrian Matejka writes of When My Brother Was an Aztec, it “is a spacious, sophisticated collection, one that puts in work addressing the author’s divergent experiences—whether it be family, skin politics, hoops, code switching, or government commodities.” According to Publishers Weekly, “Diaz portrays experiences rooted in Native American life with personal and mythic power.”

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. Diaz is also an advocate for the Mojave language and a director of the language preservation program at Fort Mojave. Her work with the three surviving fluent speakers of Mojave has been featured on news outlets including PBS NewsHour. She is a graduate of Old Dominion University, where she earned her MFA after playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia.

Her poetry has received the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf, the Narrative Poetry Prize, the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, a US Artists Ford Fellowship, a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her poems, folding Spanish and Mojave into American English, yield an urgent and important new voice to the cannon of contemporary Native American poetry. Matejka, who chose Diaz as a Poetry Society of America “New American Poet,” explains that her work “is about the transformation of traditions—the traditions of poverty, the traditions of Indigenousness, the traditions of poetics.”

A book-signing and question and answer session will follow her reading. This event is free to the public and the ECU community, thanks to the Office of the Provost, the LGBT Resource Office, and the Departments of English, History, and Anthropology.

On October 1st, Diaz will also give a talk on literary citizenship for ECU students and faculty only. It will be held in the Green Room in the Croatan Building from 12-1:30. Food will be served, and books will be available for purchase.

For more information about the workshops, please contact: John Hoppenthaler HOPPENTHALERJ@ecu.edu.