Author: Natalie Diaz and Michelle Cruz Gonzales in Conversation
Channel: San Francisco Public Library
Date: 2022-04-26

An evening with 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry winner, Natalie Diaz in conversation with author and educator Michelle Cruz Gonzales. 

Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Diaz studies the body through desire and the preservation of Native American lives and cultures, suggesting that to exist as a Native in a world with a history of colonization and genocide is itself a form of protest and celebration. In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of Indigenous, Latinx, Black and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.   

Postcolonial Love Poem is the Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award, a Finalist for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection, among others. 

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. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. She is 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. Diaz was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program. 

Michelle Cruz Gonzales is an English professor and author of the memoir, The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band which is taught in colleges and universities all over the United States. She has essays and fiction in anthologies by Putnam, PM Press, Seal Press and Literary Kitchen, and she has published online in Longreads, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Latino Rebels and Mitu. She recently completed a satirical novel about near-future-California that secedes from the US and forces intermarriage between whites and Mexicanos for the purpose of creating a race of beautiful, intelligent, hardworking people and she is currently at work on a screenplay.