On Friday, March 3, the Literature and Creative Writing department hosted a poetry reading by venerated poet Natalie Diaz on Zoom. Diaz is Mojave and part of the Gila River Indian community and played professional basketball in Europe and Asia before becoming a poet. Professor Hall and Professor Springer welcomed all participants into the webinar after some technical difficulties, which was followed by Professor Springer’s highly anticipated and in–depth introduction of Diaz and her work.

Diaz’s debut book of poetry

When My Brother Was an Aztec

was published in 2012. She mostly read poems from this book, but poems from her sophomore collection,

Postcolonial Love Poem

, published in 2020, made an appearance in the sequence of readings as well. Diaz’s literary accolades include the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf, the Narrative Poetry Prize and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She currently holds a position as an Associate Professor at Arizona State University and conducts language revitalization work with Mojave speakers.

Diaz’s reading consisted of an introduction of each poem that included the story behind its conception, how she crafted it and how it relates to the larger themes of her life experience and body of work. Some specific highlights include the poems “Bloodlight,” “The Mustangs,” “They Don’t Love You Like I Love You” and “From The Desire-Filled.” The words and imagery behind poems such as “The Mustangs” and “Bloodlight’’ illustrate some of the frequent themes that reappear in Diaz’s poems, such as the shared passion of basketball between her and her brother and her brother’s debilitating meth addiction. Her poetry also addressed her relationship with her Indigenous identity, the treatment of Indigenous people by the American government, mental health and exploration of the meaning of family.

Diaz’s performance of her poems amplified their emotionally raw intensity in a way that was enlightening rather than shocking. Her work asks the reader to rethink how they perceive the quiet violence in their lives and possibly even see the beauty within them. Diaz recounted tales of her mother’s advice to her as a young Indigenous woman, her brother’s violent outbursts brought on by his addiction and her reframing of anxiety. Through these stories, she paints a colorfully complicated yet beautiful tapestry of her experience as an Indigenous women who navigated a multitude of avenues of her life and learned how to share them through the gift of her lyrically bright, subversive and honest poetry.

After the performance of her poems, Diaz began to take questions from Zoom audience members. Whether giving advice to young writers about the placement and power of motifs in poetry or talking about the intersection between her life as a professional basketball player and her life as a award-winning poet, Diaz readily provided thoughtful responses to those who asked questions and shared her experience with enthusiasm.

When Diaz was asked about the constraints and freedoms of the revision process and how a young poet should handle that, she exclaimed that young writers should not be afraid of the revision process. She shared that her outlook on the revision process is comparable to being in a field in which she can run and roll around with all of the never-ending possibilities of a poem, while still uncovering places in which additions and subtractions can be made to further strip back the emotional impact of a poem that she’s trying to reach.

Diaz’s sincere desire to share her poetry with students of the Hamilton community was admired and appreciated, prompting the College and Creative Writing department to consider future readings of her work.