When My Brother Was an Aztec

Natalie Diaz (born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California) is a Mojave and Latina poet whose work engages the violence of American colonialism, Indigenous language loss, addiction, and the body with lyric ferocity. She was a professional basketball player before turning to poetry. She received her MFA from Old Dominion University. Her debut collection When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon, 2012) received the American Book Award. Her second collection Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf, 2020) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. A MacArthur Fellow, she is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University and co-director of the Language and Culture Center for the Mojave people.