Natalie Diaz was born on 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 (Akimel O’odham). Diaz is the author of Postcolonial Love Poem; winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; finalist for the National Book Award, Forward Prize in Poetry, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and winner of a Publishing Triangle Award. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was winner of an American Book Award. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellow, a Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellow, and a former Princeton University Hodder Fellow. Diaz is founding director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, where she is a professor in the English MFA program. In 2021, Diaz was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Diaz resides in Phoenix, Arizona, where she continues the lifelong work of documenting Native and Indigenous languages. She was a 2023–24 Mellon Foundation Research Residency Fellow and is a senior fellow at the New School Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy as well as the 2023–24 Yale University Rosenkranz Writer in Residence.  

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