I CAN’T remember the first time I met Natalie Diaz. Maybe that’s because she has always felt like family, someone I have always known. Someone who has always been a part of me—of all of us. To hear her speak of our connections to ancestors, the land, water, the self is to be at once moved and awakened. She is thoughtful and connected. She is Indigenous, Latinx, queer. She is brilliant both on and off the page. So many of us knew this long before the MacArthur Foundation awarded her a “Genius” Fellowship in 2018. She is a woman fiercely allied to people, to animals and to the land, to the past and to the present, to poetry and to activism. To sit with her is to become aware of both how much I know about the world and myself and how much I don’t. To sit with her is to understand the depth and strength of our words, the magnitude of our voices against a country and history that has too often tried to erase us.
Diaz was born on the Fort Mojave Indian reservation in Needles, California, the daughter of a Mexican Spanish father and a Fort Mojave Akimel O’odham mother. She is a member of the Gila River Indian Community. While she is currently the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, as a child she could have scarcely imagined herself a poet. Basketball, the dream ticket off the reservation, took Diaz to Old Dominion University. There, when not playing on the team, she played hoops with the poet Tim Seibles, who encouraged Diaz to write while she was recovering from an injury. And while a professional basketball career took her abroad, to Turkey, Austria, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal, she returned home to start a language revitalization program with her elders at Fort Mojave.
This story is from the March - April 2020 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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This story is from the March - April 2020 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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