A Mojave poet and enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe, Natalie Diaz was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She played professional basketball before turning to poetry and earned her MFA from Old Dominion University. Her debut collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon, 2012), received an American Book Award. Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf, 2020) won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Forward Prize. A MacArthur Fellow, she holds the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University and directs the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.
