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. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is a Lannan Literary Fellow, a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow, and a 2015 Hodder Fellow. Diaz is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University, and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Rez MFA program, Princeton University, and New York University, and she works with the last remaining speakers at Fort Mojave to revitalize the Mojave language.