Postcolonial Love Poem: A Reading and Conversation with Natalie Diaz

Natalie Diaz | Art by Ryan Redcorn / Buffalo Nickel Creative

Overview

Natalie Diaz released her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, in 2012. This March, she released her second book, Post Colonial Love Poem, described by The New York Times as “no doubt one of the most important poetry releases in years.” Diaz is joined by poet Sarreta Morgan as they both share some of their newest work and take listener questions.

Natalie Diaz is a poet, language activist and educator 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. She is 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program.

As a writer and artist, Saretta Morgan’s current work uses text, etching, sculpture, and video to engage relationships between ecology, Black diaspora and migration in the United States Southwest. She is based between Phoenix and Mohave Valley, Arizona where she teaches creative writing at Arizona State University and is an active member of the grassroots humanitarian aid organization, No More Deaths Phoenix, which supports the safe passage of migrants in the U.S. Mexico borderlands.

Saretta is author of the chapbooks, Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) and room for a counter interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2017). She has received support from the Jerome Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, Virginia Piper Foundation, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. Recent work can be found at Triple Canopy, The Colorado Review, and Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day.