The CU Denver Creative Writing Program presents the third annual Jake Adam York Memorial Reading, featuring award-winning poet Natalie Diaz. The Jake Adam York Reading is held each spring and features a poet or prose writer whose work, like Jake’s, engages with history and/or issues of social importance.
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. After playing professional basketball for four years in Europe and Asia, Diaz returned to the States to complete her MFA at Old Dominion University. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is a 2012 Lannan Literary Fellow and a 2012 Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. In 2014, she was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, as well as the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, and a U.S. Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency MFA program and lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she directs the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program, working with the last remaining Mojave speakers at Fort Mojave to teach and revitalize the Mojave language. She is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.
For more on Diaz, see her profile on PBS’s NewsHour.
The reading will take place at 6:30 PM in the Tivoli Building, room 640, on the University of Colorado Denver campus. Parking is available in the Tivoli parking garage at the intersection of Auraria Parkway and 9th Street. The reading is free and open to the public. A Q & A, book signing, and reception will follow.