Natalie Diaz | Postcolonial Love Poem with Denice Frohman

Recorded April 21, 2021

Natalie Diaz is the author of When My Brother Was an Aztec, an "ambitious . . . beautiful" (New York Times) American Book Award-winning poetry collection that ruminates on her sibling’s drug addiction. A former professional basketball player, an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community, and an English professor at Arizona State University, she is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. In her National Book Award-nominated sophomore collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, Diaz transcends the horrors committed by America upon Indigenous people to find sublimity amongst vistas of words, the reversal of erasure, and the choice to love.

Acclaimed for celebrating identity, lineage, and the subversion of traditional notions of power, poet Denice Frohman has performed at the Obama White House, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Apollo, among a multitude of other venues. A former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, she has published work in Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump, and The Acentos Review, among many other places. Frohman is a former director at the Philly Youth Poetry Movement, has received fellowships and grants from numerous arts institutions, and has been prominently featured on BuzzFeed, Cosmopolitan, and Refinery29.

Tommy Orange | There There with Rachel Kushner | The Mars Room

Recorded May 15, 2019

"Masterful. . . . A devastating debut novel" (Washington Post), Tommy Orange’s There There has been lauded as a new American treasure by some of the country’s greatest writers and esteemed publications. A New York Times bestseller and one of its 10 Best Books of the Year, it follows the convergence of 12 unforgettable Native American characters living in Oakland, California, building to a shocking but inexorable conclusion. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, Orange teaches in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner is the author of The Flamethrowers, a "white-hot ember of a book" (Los Angeles Times) that traces the jagged trajectory of a young woman through the 1970s New York art scene, and Telex from Cuba, in which two American children in a gilded rural enclave sense the impending Castro revolution. In The Mars Room, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Kushner tells the "tough, prismatic" yet "surprisingly luminous" (Wall Street Journal) story of a young woman at the outset of a double life sentence in a California prison.

David Treuer | The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

Recorded March 7, 2019

An Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota and an unromantic chronicler of Native American culture and literature, David Treuer is the author of the novels Prudence, Little, The Hiawatha, and The Translation of Dr. Appeles. He is a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California, a Pushcart Prize winner, and a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer offers an epic counter-narrative to the conventional histories of Native American life from the 1890 massacre to the present.

Louise Erdrich | LaRose

Recorded May 11, 2016

A "brilliant chronicler of the American Indian experience" (Reader’s Digest), Louise Erdrich revisits the beloved and familiar Ojibwe reservation of her North Dakota childhood—illuminating the mythical and magical in the detail of the every day—in her more than two dozen novels, children’s stories, nonfiction works, and poetry collections. Her novels include Love Medicine, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse; and The Plague of Doves, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her 2012 novel The Round House won the National Book Award. Erdrich’s latest novel, LaRose, tells a tale of natural justice and the reparation of the human heart.