Skirball Tapes: Natalie Diaz

A ground-breaking poet, language activist, and educator, Natalie Diaz authored two poetry collections: When My Brother Was an Aztec and Postcolonial Love Poem, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Diaz is the founding director of Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, where she holds the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, and Senior Fellow at the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School, she’s also the Inaugural Baldwin-Emerson Fellow for the “I See My Light Shining” Oral History Project in which she gathers the stories and experiences of Native artists and scholars whose work is shaped by water. Diaz recently received the 2023 Arts and Letters Award from the Pete C. Garcia Victoria Foundation and is a member of the Board of the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the United States Artists. She is the spring 2024 Rosenkranz Writer-In-Residence at Yale University.

Catharine Stimpson is a University Professsor at New York University. Currently the editor of a book series for the University of Chicago Press, she was the founding editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Her many other publications include a novel, Class Notes; a selection of essays, Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces; and a book on Gertrude Stein, which is under contract to the University of Chicago Press. In addition, more than 150 of her monographs, essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in Transatlantic Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Critical Inquiry, boundary 2, and other publications. Dean Stimpson is the Chair of the National Advisory Committee of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and past president of the Association of Graduate Schools. She is former chair of the New York State Humanities Council, the Ms. Magazine Board of Scholars, and the National Council for Research on Women, as well as past president of the Modern Language Association. She serves on the boards of other educational and cultural organizations, and from 1994-2000, was on the board of PBS. She has been awarded both Fulbright and Rockefeller Humanities Fellowships, as well as grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.