Old Dominion graduate wins Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Old Dominion University alumna Natalie Diaz was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection “Postcolonial Love Poem” Friday.

The jury described her winning work as a “collection of tender, heart-wrenching and defiant poems that explore what it means to love and be loved in an America beset by conflict.”

Born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, Calif., Diaz is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe.

During her time as an undergraduate at ODU, Diaz played point guard on the women’s basketball team.

After earning her bachelor’s degree in 2000, Diaz played professional basketball in Europe and Asia before returning to ODU for a master’s degree in fine arts. She received her MFA in 2007.

“For me, poetry is one way I center myself in my body,” Diaz said in a video by the MacArthur Foundation after earning a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2018. “I really believe in the physical power of poetry, of language. Where we come from, we say language has an energy, and I feel that it’s a physical energy. To me, it’s very similar to what I did on a basketball court.”

Diaz’s publisher, Graywolf Press, said in its description of “Postcolonial Love Poem” that “Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves.”

“Postcolonial Love Poem” was also a finalist in 2020 for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. It was shortlisted for the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize.

Diaz, 42, now serves as the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She also has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a USA fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship.

Ali Sullivan, ali.sullivan@virginiamedia.com