In Conversation: Natalie Diaz and A.K. Burns, with Ching-In Chen

Join poet Natalie Diaz and artist A.K. Burns for an evening of poetry and conversation that explores the significance of land, water, and language across their practices. Held in conjunction with Burns’s exhibition What is Perverse is Liquid, this program is inspired by the role of creative connection and relationship to artistic life and imagination.

Diaz is a Pulitzer-Prize winning Mojave poet and author of Postcolonial Love Poem, a poetry collection that has been a source of artistic affinity and inspiration for Burns’s work. At the Henry, Diaz will offer a reading from the collection alongside a presentation by Burns. A conversation in response to each other’s work will follow, moderated by writer and UW Bothell creative writing professor Ching-In Chen.

About the Speakers

A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist and associate professor in the Department of Art at Hunter College, City University of New York. Using video, installation, sculpture, drawing, and collaboration and working at the nexus of language and materiality, Burns troubles systems that assign value and explores their sociopolitical embodiment. Burns has exhibited internationally, including at 2018’s FRONT International, Cleveland, Ohio; the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf, Germany; MMK Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; New Museum, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. Burns was a founding member of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists in the Greater Economy), a nonprofit artists’ advocacy group. Community Action Center (2010), a video made in collaboration with A.L. Steiner that re-imagines pornographic cinema for queer womxn, trans and nonbinary bodies, has screened internationally, including the Tate, London; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Burns is a 2023 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow; a 2016 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award Recipient.

Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe, she received her BA and MFA from Old Dominion University. Diaz is the author of Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and finalist for the National Book Award and the Forward Prize in Poetry, and When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), winner of an American Book Award. Diaz has received fellowships from The MacArthur Foundation, the Lannan Literary Foundation, the Native Arts Council Foundation, and Princeton University. She was awarded the 2023 Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize. She is also a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumnus of the Ford Fellowship. A language activist, Diaz is 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 teaches in the MFA program. In 2021, Diaz was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Phoenix.

Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi/Red Hen Press, 2009), recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017, winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), and the forthcoming Shiny City (Airlie Press, 2025) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Massage Parlor Organizing Project core member, Kelsey Street Press collective member, Airlie Press editor and Nonfiction Coordinator for Best of the Net. They serve on the Governing Council of Seattle's Cultural Space Agency and on the board of Seattle City of Literature and as the Poet Laureate of the city of Redmond, Washington. They received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC and Intercultural Leadership Institute and the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice. They currently teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell.