The awards ceremony for NEOMED’s annual William Carlos Williams poetry competition will be held at the Health Humanities Consortium’s national conference in Phoenix on Saturday, April 13, from 6 – 7:30 p.m. ET.
The awards ceremony will feature readings from this year’s first-, second- and third-place winners—Jude Okonkwo, Liz Irvin and Maya J. Sorini, respectfully—and the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natalie Diaz as this year's guest reader.
About the guest reader
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 and is a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumnus of the Ford Fellowship. 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 a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Diaz resides in Phoenix, Arizona, but is currently living in Brooklyn as a Mellon Foundation Research Residency Fellowship and a Senior Fellow at The New School Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy. She is the 2024 Yale Rosenkranz Writer in Residence.
How to watch
We welcome the NEOMED community to attend the awards ceremony virtually via Zoom.
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