Award-winning poet Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, Calif., on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She is a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow, and she has won a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency and a U.S. Artists Ford Fellowship.

Her first poetry collection, “When My Brother Was an Aztec”, was published by Copper Canyon Press.

Diaz teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts’ low-residency master of fine arts program and she is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. She splits her time between the east coast and Mohave Valley, Ariz., where she works to revitalize the Mojave language.