Open today from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Natalie Diaz (Enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community): Public Reading and Conversation

Date & Time

Wednesday, November 19, 2025, 7:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m.

Category

Films & Performances

Location

Zimmerli Art Museum

71 Hamilton St, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901

Information

FREE and open to the public.

The discussion will be followed by a reception.

If you anticipate needing any type of accommodation or have questions about the access provided, please call Nicole Simpson, Access Coordinator, at 848-932-6178 or email nsimpson@zimmerli.rutgers.edu in advance of your participation.

Light blue background with a red cactus flower in the foreground. The cactus is thorny and rises on a dark brownish red stem.

G. Peter Jemison (Seneca, Heron Clan), "Red Power", 1973, acrylic on canvas. Tia Collection, Santa Fe, NM; James Hart Photography.

Pulitizer Prize-winning poet Natalie Diaz (Enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community) gives a public reading in conjunction with the Zimmerli's special exhibition, Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always. This event is presented in collaboration with Writers @ Rutgers. A Q&A, book signing, and reception will follow the reading.

Natalie Diaz wears all black with her arms crossed in front of dead branches. She has a serious expression emphasized by her minimalistic jewelry and straight black hair.
Photo credit: Scott Baxter Photography

Natalie Diaz was born on 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 (Akimel O’odham). Diaz is the author of Postcolonial Love Poem, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, finalist for the National Book Award, Forward Prize in Poetry, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of a Publishing Triangle Award. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was winner of an American Book Award. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellow, a Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellow, and a former Princeton University Hodder Fellow. She was awarded the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize and is a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumnus of the Ford Fellowship. Diaz is Founding Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, where she is a Professor in the English MFA program. In 2021, Diaz was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Diaz resides in Phoenix, Arizona, where she continues the life-long work of documenting Native and Indigenous languages. She has received a Mellon Foundation Research Residency Fellowship, along with being an inaugural Baldwin-Emerson Fellow and a Senior Fellow at The New School Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy. She is the 2024 Yale Rosenkranz Writer in Residence.

Additional information about parking registration coming soon.

The Zimmerli’s operations, exhibitions, and programs are funded in part by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and income from the Avenir Endowment Fund and the Andrew W. Mellon Endowment Fund. Additional support comes from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the donors, members, and friends of the museum.

Generous support for bilingual text was provided by Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All program.

Grant funding has been provided by the Middlesex County Board of County Commissioners through a grant award from the Middlesex County Cultural and Arts Trust Fund. For information on events, go to MiddlesexCountyCulture.com

Middlesex County NJ logo - Green text Middlesex in san serif font with County - NJ smaller underneath in black
Red and blue lines underline text reading National Endowment for the Arts art.gov
 
Logo with red Rutgers R and text that read "Rutgers the State University of New Jersey".
Text reading "Art Bridges Foundation" with a purple arch connecting the words.
Large letter A with the text next to it reading in full "Avenir Foundation Inc."
Hand drawn squiggly letter M next to text reading "Mellon Foundation".
Black circle with black text reading "New Jersey State Council on the Arts Est. 1966" with a red triangle and swoosh in the center.
Black text reading "Bloomberg Connects", the letter O in the word Connects has been designed as a magnifying glass.