Natalie Diaz on Finding the Ecstatic

Deanna Dent

“Anxiety, I think, is ecstatic. Being pushed to the limit. There have been times when I know my body can’t go anymore— and yet it is? So that’s not a real time, I think. I’ve learned to measure time with my body, but that’s something that exists outside of me.”

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. Her second, Postcolonial Love Poem, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020, and is a finalist for a National Book Award. She is 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program.