Lion Rock Visiting Writers Series: Natalie Diaz
The annual CWU Lion Rock Visiting Writers Series continues this month, with an opportunity to hear from poet Natalie Diaz Tuesday, May 17th at 7:30 p.m. in the Wellington Event Center on CWU's campus. Diaz will be reading from her first poetry collection titled "When My Brother Was an Aztec" (Copper Canyon Press). Natalie Diaz appears in conjunction with "Mass Incarceration and Racial Justice: Black and Brown Lives Do Matter," this year's theme for the CWU Social Justice and Human Rights Dialogues. Her poetry is about her childhood on an Indian reservation as well as her meth-addicted, shape-shifting brother. A New York Times reviewer called it an "ambitious" and "beautiful" book. Diaz will also be conducting a craft talk titled "Mining the Deep: Discovering Our Emotional Images" earlier in the day at noon in Black Hall room 151. Both events are free and open to the public, with the author's book available for sale at the evening event, courtesy of the CWU Wildcat Shop. Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She attended Old Dominion University with a full athletic scholarship and then was a professional basketball player in Europe and Asia before she returned for her MFA in Creative Writing. She is a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. In 2014, she was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Her honors and awards also include the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf, and the Narrative Poetry Prize. Diaz teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency MFA program and lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, 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. She is also the 2015-2016 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, currently working on her second book of poems. For more information about Natalie Diaz and her works visit her website: www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/natalie-diaz For more information about the Lion Rock series, visit www.cwu.edu/english/lion-rock-visiting-writers-series. This Lion Rock Visiting Writers series event is sponsored by CWU's College of Arts and Humanities, Inklings Club, ASCWU Club Senate, Department of English, Wildcat Shop and Karen Gookin.
Date and Time
Tuesday May 17, 2016
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM PDT
May 17 Noon and 7:30 p.m.
Location
Central Washington University Wellington Event Center 400 East University Way Ellensburg, WA 98926
Fees/Admission
Free and open to the public
Contact Information
Lisa Norris, CWU English Department
Phone: 509-963-1745
Email: NorrisL@cwu.edu
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