Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mohave Indian Reservation in Needles, California. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for four years, she returned to ODU to complete her MFA. She has been awarded the 2007 Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry and the 2007 Tobias Wolff Fiction Prize. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon. [extracted from 2010 festival brochure]
