I CAN’T remember the first time I met Natalie Diaz. Maybe that’s because she has always felt like family, someone I have always known. Someone who has always been a part of me—of all of us. To hear her speak of our connections to ancestors, the land, water, the self is to be at once moved and awakened. She is thoughtful and connected. She is Indigenous, Latinx, queer. She is brilliant both on and off the page. So many of us knew this long before the MacArthur Foundation awarded her a “Genius” Fellowship in 2018. She is a woman fiercely allied to people, to animals and to the land, to the past and to the present, to poetry and to activism. To sit with her is to become aware of both how much I know about the world and myself and how much I don’t. To sit with her is to understand the depth and strength of our words, the magnitude of our voices against a country and history that has too often tried to erase us.
Diaz was born on the Fort Mojave Indian reservation in Needles, California, the daughter of a Mexican Spanish father and a Fort Mojave Akimel O’odham mother. She is a member of the Gila River Indian Community. While she is currently the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, as a child she could have scarcely imagined herself a poet. Basketball, the dream ticket off the reservation, took Diaz to Old Dominion University. There, when not playing on the team, she played hoops with the poet Tim Seibles, who encouraged Diaz to write while she was recovering from an injury. And while a professional basketball career took her abroad, to Turkey, Austria, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal, she returned home to start a language revitalization program with her elders at Fort Mojave.
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
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READING The Museum of Human History felt like listening to a great harmonic hum. After I finished it I found the hum lingering in my ears. Its echo continued for days.
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SHASTRI Akella's poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father's violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother's unfathomable grief.
The History of a Difficult Child
MIHRET Sibhat's debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though. He were mad at somebody.
The Sorrows of Others
AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
We Are a Haunting
TYRIEK White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy.
RADICAL ATTENTION
IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
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Blooming how she must
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