Mojave poet to speak at WWU March 9

Poet Natalie Diaz will be speaking on the Western Washington University campus at 4:15 p.m. Monday, March 9, in Fraser Hall Room 102.

Diaz has been featured on PBS Newshour and recently was selected to be the Holmes Fellow at Princeton University.

The event, sponsored by the WWU English Department and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, is free and open to the public. Books will be available for sale through the WWU AS Bookstore.

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. Her first poetry collection, "When My Brother Was an Aztec," was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is a 2012 Lannan Literary Fellow and a 2012 Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. In 2104, she was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, as well as the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University and a US Artists Ford Fellowship.

She teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Rez MFA program and lives in Mohave Valley, Ariz., where she directs the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program, working with the last remaining speakers at Fort Mojave to teach and revitalize the Mojave language.