Natalie Diaz

Natalie Diaz (born 1978) is a Mojave American poet whose work has achieved something rare: poems that are simultaneously political, erotic, linguistically innovative, and deeply personal, without any of those dimensions diminishing the others. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning Postcolonial Love Poem (2020) is one of the most important American poetry collections of the twenty-first century, a book that addresses colonialism, desire, environmental destruction, and Indigenous language through a lens of bodily immediacy that recalls Whitman and Lorca but sounds like no one else.

Life and Career

Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village on the California-Arizona border. She is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Before becoming a poet, she was a professional basketball player — she played in Europe and Asia after college — and this athletic background gives her poetry a physical specificity and competitive intensity that distinguishes it from much academic verse.

She earned her MFA from Old Dominion University and has directed the Fort Mojave language revitalization program, working to preserve the Mojave language. This work is not separate from her poetry — it is central to it. Many of her poems think about what it means when a language dies, when the words for things in one’s ancestral language cannot be translated into English, when colonial languages carry within them the structures of dispossession.

When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012, Copper Canyon Press) was her debut collection and announced a major voice. The book’s title poem concerns her brother’s methamphetamine addiction — a devastation rendered with mythological imagery and furious love. Other poems deal with growing up on the reservation, with desire, with basketball, with the way the body knows things the mind cannot articulate.

Postcolonial Love Poem

Postcolonial Love Poem (2020, Graywolf Press) won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Forward Prize. The collection’s central achievement is its refusal to separate the political from the personal. Poems about wanting a woman’s body exist alongside poems about the damming of the Colorado River; poems about Mojave language loss sit next to poems about sex and tenderness. The implication — that desire, landscape, language, and politics are inseparable for an Indigenous person living in a colonized landscape — is not stated but enacted.

The Colorado River recurs throughout the book as both literal waterway and spiritual entity. Diaz’s treatment of the river — as relative, as endangered being, as body of water that is literally her body — represents one of the most compelling examples of Indigenous environmental writing in contemporary literature.

Diaz teaches at Arizona State University, where she directs the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018.

Key Works

• When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012)
• Postcolonial Love Poem (2020)

Collecting Diaz

When My Brother Was an Aztec first edition (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) is the key collectible — a small-press debut that was not widely distributed. Signed copies bring $75–$300. Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf, 2020) first edition signed is $50–$200 and rising after the Pulitzer. Copper Canyon and Graywolf both produce relatively small print runs, making first editions inherently limited. Diaz signs at readings and events. Her MacArthur and Pulitzer recognition make her debut increasingly sought, and prices are likely to continue rising.