Reading: Natalie Diaz & Nina Mingya Powles - River /Mouth / 河口
Join us for our Five Bodies series of free monthly talks and readings exploring creative-critical writing, hybrid methodologies and experimental thinking.
A collaboration between the Critical Poetics Research Group at Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham Contemporary, this series of talks and readings investigates poetic ecologies in the Anthropocene. Exploring ideas from weeds and water to eco-trauma and deep time, and featuring some of the most important international creative-critical voices working today, the talks and readings aim to open up new conversations about entanglement, coexistence, resilience and sustainability.
This is an edited recording of the event.
For the full programme of Five Bodies events, please click here.
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 and won an American Book Award. Her second book, Postcolonial Love Poem, was published by Graywolf Press in March 2020 and was a finalist for the National Book Award the Forward Prize, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2021. She is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow, as well as a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize and a Hodder Fellowship. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumni of the Ford Fellowship. Diaz is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.
Nina Mingya Powles is a writer, poet and maker from Aotearoa New Zealand, currently living in London. Her poetry collection Magnolia 木蘭 (2020) was a finalist in the New Zealand Book Awards and the Forward Prizes. She is also the author of several zines and pamphlets, as well as a food memoir, Tiny Moons (2020) and a collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water (2021).