Poet Natalie Diaz to Deliver Public Reading at Simsbury School

On November 2, Natalie Diaz, an award-winning poet, will deliver a public reading of her work as the Fall 2018 Visiting Writer at The Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, CT. Earlier this month, Diaz was named one of 25 winners of this year's John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships, commonly known as 'genius' grants awarded annually to individuals who have demonstrated originality, insight and potential for future achievements.

Diaz was born and rasied in Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, CA, 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.

Diaz's 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 US 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.

Members of the adult community are invited to attend a reception and reading by Diaz of her work at The Ethel Walker School campus in Simsbury, CT. For more information and to RSVP, please visit www.ethelwalker.org.

The Visiting Writer Seminar at The Ethel Walker School is a special class in the English Department where students are introduced, on the page and in person, to a living writer. Participation in the Seminar is an immersive author experience where students become scholars in that writer’s works, and the course culminates with a visit by that writer to the school. During the visit, the writer teaches master classes, conducts writing workshops and participates in class discussions. The writer also delivers a school-wide assembly and engages in a public reading with the community.

The Ethel Walker School is an independent, college preparatory, boarding and day school in Simsbury, CT for girls in grades six through 12 plus a postgraduate year. Since 1911, Walker's has excelled at preparing students to make a difference in the world. Members of this diverse community are dedicated to scholarship, the arts, athletics, wellness and service. In fall 2017, the school celebrated the 100th anniversary of the school's Simsbury campus; the school's original campus was in Lakewood, New Jersey from 1911 until 1917.