Native American poet, activist to visit ECU
Natalie Diaz
(Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths)
East Carolina University’s Contemporary Writers Series will welcome Native American poet and activist Natalie Diaz on Oct. 2.
Author of “When My Brother Was an Aztec,” Diaz will read from her work at 7 p.m. in the Jenkins Fine Arts Center, Room 1220. A book signing and question and answer session will follow the reading.
Fellow American poet Adrian Matejka decribes “When My Brother Was an Aztec” as “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.” The book was a 2012 Lannan Literary Selection.
According to Publishers Weekly, “Diaz portrays experiences rooted in Native American life with personal and mythic power.”
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 also is 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 master of fine arts degree after playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia.
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.”
Diaz’s 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 U.S. Artists Ford Fellowship, a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
This event is free and open to the public. It is co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost, LGBT Resource Office, and the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences Departments of English, History and Anthropology. For more information, contact John Hoppenthaler, professor of English, at hoppenthalerj@ecu.edu.
-by Lacey L. Gray, University Communications