John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships, unofficially
known as “genius” grants, recognize “exceptional creativity” and come with awards
of $625,000 each, distributed over five years.
Natalie Diaz draws on her experience as a
Mojave American and Latina to challenge the
About Natalie's Work Natalie Diaz is a poet
blending personal, political, and cultural references in works that challenge
the systems of belief underlying contemporary American culture. She connects
her own experiences as a Mojave American and Latina woman to widely recognized
cultural and mythological touchstones, creating a personal mythology that
viscerally conveys the oppression and violence that continue to afflict
Indigenous Americans in a variety of forms.
In her first collection, When
My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), Diaz reflects on her brother’s drug
addiction, drawing upon Mojave, Greek, and Christian symbols to describe his
destructive behavior and its effect on her family. Her brother is alternately a
charismatic Icarus persuading his parents to let him come home again, the
figure of Judas betraying his family, and most hauntingly, an Aztec god who
devours his parents every morning. In “My Brother at 3 A.M.,” addiction is
personified as the Devil, seen by her brother in his hallucinatory state and
then by her mother as she recognizes her son’s brutal and desperate condition.
Other poems in the collection focus on Diaz’s childhood on a reservation.
“Hand-Me-Down Halloween” is an angry eruption of language that ensues in the
wake of the speaker being taunted by a white boy for wearing a secondhand Tonto
costume. She takes a more satirical and wry approach in “The Last Mojave Indian
Barbie,” folding a biting critique of economic inequality, stereotyping,
appropriation, body-image issues, and consumer culture into a series of
tableaux centering around a Barbie of Mojave identity trying to fit into a
standard Barbie universe.
Diaz ends the book with poems about an unnamed beloved, and
in more recent poems she has continued to explore expressions of Indigenous
love in nature, family, and community. Other recent poems, such as “American
Arithmetic”—about police violence against Native Americans—and “The First
Water Is the Body”—written in honor of the Standing Rock protesters and her own
Mojave people—engage directly with the bodily oppression of Indigenous
Americans and the urgency of survival. Diaz is a powerful new poetic voice, and
she is broadening the venues for and reach of Indigenous perspectives through
her teaching, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and language preservation
efforts.
Biography Natalie Diaz received a B.A. (2000) and
M.F.A. (2006) from Old Dominion University. She is Mojave and an enrolled
member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Diaz’s poems and essays have appeared in
such publications as Narrative Magazine, Guernica, Poetry Magazine, the
New Republic, Tin House, and Prairie Schooner, among others, and she
is an associate professor in the Department of English at Arizona State
University.
Short video: https://www.macfound.org/fellows/1007/
Source: MacArthur Fellows Program
