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Hello Friends,

Join us to welcome Pulitzer-Prize winning Mojave poet, linguist and educator, Natalie Diaz on Thursday morning, 2/12, 9am-10:30am with breakfast and community at CNAIR.

See info below from Daisy/English Dept about her reading later that night – and there’s an RSVP link!

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Mojave poet Natalie Diaz will be on campus next Thursday, 2/12 reading from her work, which include the books When My Brother Was an Aztec and Post-Colonial Love Poem.  She’ll be at Harris Hall, Room 107, 5-7pm. A big thank you to the Litowitz MFA+MA Program and the English department for bringing Diaz to NU!

Don’t know Natalia Diaz's poetry? Watch her read "They Don’t Love You Like I Love You”  or enjoy it below!  

Reserve your ticket for 2/12 here. 

Cheers,

Daisy Hernández

pronouns: she | ella

Associate Professor

Director of Undergraduate Studies, Creative Writing

Department of English

Book office hours at this link

Zoom Office Here

I acknowledge that Northwestern resides on the ancestral lands of the Council of Three Fires–Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi–as well as the historic lands of the Ho-Chunk, Menominee, and Myaamia peoples.

They Don’t Love You Like I Love You
By Natalie Diaz
My mother said this to me
long before Beyoncé lifted the lyrics
from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,

and what my mother meant by
Don’t stray was that she knew
all about it—the way it feels to need

someone to love you, someone
not your kind, someone white,
some one some many who live

because so many of mine
have not, and further, live on top of
those of ours who don’t.

I’ll say, say, say,
I’ll say, say, say,
What is the United States if not a clot

of clouds? If not spilled milk? Or blood?
If not the place we once were
in the millions? America is Maps—

Maps are ghosts: white and 
layered with people and places I see through.
My mother has always known best,

knew that I’d been begging for them,
to lay my face against their white
laps, to be held in something more

than the loud light of their projectors
as they flicker themselves—sepia
or blue—all over my body.

All this time,
I thought my mother said, Wait,
as in, Give them a little more time

to know your worth,
when really, she said, Weight,
meaning heft, preparing me

for the yoke of myself,
the beast of my country’s burdens,
which is less worse than

my country’s plow. Yes,
when my mother said,
They don’t love you like I love you,

she meant,
Natalie, that doesn’t mean
you aren’t good.