This event features a reading with poet Natalie Diaz and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson at the Amerind Museum in Dragoon, Arizona, in support of the 2026 Indigenous Nations Poets retreat. The outdoor, full-moon reading will take place on April 1 at 7:00 PM. Additional retreat readings with fellows and faculty will be held at the Poetry Center on April 2 and April 3.
The Amerind Museum is based in an absolutely beautiful landscape on the edge of Texas Canyon—an area distinguished by stunning tent rock/hoodoo rock formations. It is about a 1 hr drive east from Tucson, just off 1-10.
To support being part of this event, the Poetry Center is hosting a free bus service from the Poetry Center, departing at 5:30pm, and returning back to the Poetry Center after the event is over. Seating is limited, and you must reserve a spot in advance to claim it. Parking is free in the surface lots around the Poetry Center starting at 5pm. Here are details on reserving a bus seat: https://poetry.arizona.edu/calendar/offsite-reading-natalie-diaz-leanne-betasamosake-simpson
(You can of course also drive on your own!)
Because this event will be outdoors, please dress with layers to be comfortable for an early April Southern Arizona reading. Water bottles, folding camping chairs, and a small flashlight are encouraged. Some seating is available. I’m pasting a bit about the writers below!
Natalie Diaz was born on 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 (Akimel O’odham). Diaz is the author of Postcolonial Love Poem, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, finalist for the National Book Award, Forward Prize in Poetry, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of a Publishing Triangle Award. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was winner of an American Book Award. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellow, a Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellow, and a former Princeton University Hodder Fellow. She was awarded the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize. Diaz is Founding Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, where she is a Professor in the English MFA program. In 2021, Diaz was elected the youngest ever Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Diaz splits here time between her homelands in Phoenix, Arizona and along the waterways of Manahatta in New York. She was recently awarded a 2023 and 2024 Mellon Foundation Research Residency Fellowship, an inaugural Baldwin-Emerson Shining Light Fellowship, a 2024 Margaret Casey Foundation Freedom Fellow, and also served as the Yale Rosenkranz Writer in Residence in 2024 and 2025. She is currently a Senior Fellow at The New School Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg musician, writer and academic, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Her work breaks open the boundaries between story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity.Working for two decades as an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellectual practices, Leanne has lectured and taught extensively at universities across Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Europe and has over twenty years experience with Indigenous land based education. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and is a member of Alderville First Nation.Leanne is the author of eight books, including A Short History of the Blockade and the novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies which was short listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction and the Dublin Literary Prize. Her collaboration with Robyn Maynard, Rehearsals for Living is a National Best Seller and was short listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction. Leanne is also a musician. Her latest release Theory of Ice was named to the Polaris Prize short list, and she is the 2021 winner of the Prism Prize’s Willie Dunn Award. Leanne’s new work, Theory of Water was short-listed for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for non-fiction.
