Loft Mentor Series: Natalie Diaz

The Loft Literary Center Presents their 2018-2019 Loft Mentor Series Reading with mentor Natalie Diaz and fellows Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall and Jessie Lee-Bauder. Book sales provided by Milkweed Books. Learn more.

Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall, PhD, (creative nonfiction) is a Minneapolis-based writer and teacher. Her creative and scholarly work appears in MUTHA Magazine, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, and Feminist Formations, among others. She has been the recipient of the National Women’s Studies Association Graduate Scholarship in Lesbian Studies and of the Consortium of Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Fellowship at Purdue University. She is currently working on a book of personal essays.

Jessie Lee-Bauder’s (fiction) short stories are both confessional and surreal, as she conveys the experience of occupying an intersection of identities that simultaneously welcome and isolate. She also deals with experiences shared across identities and examines the universal wants for connection, and to love and be loved. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Macalester College and lives in Minneapolis.

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. She is a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program. She splits her time between the east coast and Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she works to revitalize the Mojave language.