Bellagio Residency: July 2022
Project: “The First Water Is the Body”
Natalie Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Mojave American poet, language activist, former professional basketball player, and educator. Diaz came to Bellagio in July 2022 to draw from her poems, “The First Water Is the Body” and “Exhibits from the American Water Museum,” to develop an audiovisual water essay and a visual treatment for a short film. Diaz is the author of Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020) and When My Brother Was an Aztec. She is a MacArthur Fellow and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair of Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University.