Natalie Diaz grew up on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation on the border of California, Arizona and Nevada. She left the reservation to play basketball for Old Dominion University in Virginia and later for professional leagues in Asia and Europe.

While she was in college, she also began to write poetry. Her first collection of poems, "When My Brother Was an Aztec," has just been published. Many of Diaz's poems deal with the harsh realities of reservation life: poverty, teen pregnancy and meth-amphetamine drug addiction.

Two years ago, Diaz felt a calling to return to the reservation to help preserve the Mojave language, which is rapidly being lost. A profile of Diaz and her language preservation work will air on the NewsHour soon, but here above is sneak peek of our interview with the 33-year-old writer, conducted along the banks of the Colorado River.

You can read some of Diaz's work here, here and here.

A transcript is after the jump.

Click to enlarge.

Moscow subway passengers ride a special exhibition car containing reproductions of watercolors from the State Tretyakov Gallery on Friday. Photo by Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images.

A weekly roundup of arts and culture headlines (back from hiatus).

Photo by Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images.

"Orange, Red, Yellow," above, an oil painting by Mark Rothko, sold for $86.9 million at a Christie's auction in New York, setting a record for the Abstract Expressionist painter. The price "was the most spectacular of 14 world records established on Tuesday," via the New York Times.

Watch the auction here.

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The blockbuster movie "The Avengers" had the biggest domestic opening weekend debut in box-office history, hauling in $200.3 million, via the Wall Street Journal.

However, "the damage inflicted on Manhattan by an army of marauding extra-terrestrials and the superpowered defenders of Earth...would cost $160 [billion] to repair, according to U.S. 'disaster experts,'" via the Guardian.

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Performance artist Marina Abramovic unveiled the design for the Marina Abramovic Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art, a $15 million center in upstate New York devoted to the research and production of duration-based works of art, via the Huffington Post.

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The best-selling erotic novels by E.L. James, a trilogy titled "Fifty Shades of Grey," might not be coming to your local library. Libraries in a few states are choosing not to stock the books or pulling them from shelves, with many citing what they say is inappropriate content, via the Christian Science Monitor.

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David H. Koch, the executive vice president of Koch Industries and a supporter of conservative causes, donated $35 million to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The gift, the largest single donation to the museum and the fifth largest in Smithsonian history, will go to a new dinosaur hall, via The Washington Post.

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In a ruling with "significant" implications for the music industry, the Village People's original lead singer, Victor Willis (the cop), can reclaim his copyright interests in the 1970s disco act's hits, including "YMCA," "In the Navy" and "Go West," via Bloomberg.

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Keith Haring, the late artist who is the subject of an ongoing exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum and was recently celebrated with a Google doodle, invented the museum gift shop, via the Christian Science Monitor.

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A man looks at Czech artist Alfons Mucha's "Slav Epic," a cycle of 20 allegories tracing the history of the Slavic people and inspired in part by mythology, at the National Gallery in Prague on Thursday. Photo by Michal Cizek /AFP/Getty Images.

Click to enlarge. "Harem #2" by Lalla Essaydi.

Moroccan-born Lalla Essaydi always knew she was going to be an artist. Her father was a painter, and some of her fondest childhood memories include drawing with colors and pencils in his studio in Marrakesh. It wasn't until a journalist spotted her photographs decades later while she was a graduate student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that she began to gain international attention.

Essaydi, who also lived in Saudi Arabia for many years and now lives in New York City, has had her work exhibited across the United States, Europe and the Middle East. Known for her large format photographs, her work combines Islamic calligraphy and representations of the female body, focusing on the interconnection of faith, culture and gender, and challenging notions within all three.

Her photographs feature women dressed in fabric inscribed with henna calligraphy posing in front of abstract backgrounds that utilize the same cloth and script. She sees her work as "intersecting with the presence and absence of boundaries; of history, gender, architecture, and culture; that mark spaces of possibility and limitation. That is my story as well."

"Revisions," which opens Wednesday at the National Museum of African Art and runs through Feb. 24, 2013, features 30 multimedia pieces selected from Essaydi's photographic series. Selections from other rarely showcased paintings and installations are also featured.

"Lalla Essaydi has used multiple artistic media to take on a central challenge: confronting deeply entrenched historical notions about femininity and womanhood through the images of the Muslim world," Johnnetta Betsch Cole, director of the National Museum of African Art, told the Smithsonian's press office. "Her work is vital and offers a fresh new voice and needed insight as it challenges the stereotype and perception of Arab, African and female identity."

Art Beat talked with Essaydi on the eve of her exhibition about her creative influences, the themes in her work and her work using multimedia:

How did your Moroccan and Saudi Arabian upbringing influence your creative work?

Lalla Essaydi: My work is really autobiographical, it's about my own experiences growing up in Morocco and living as an adult in Saudi Arabia for many years. It's obviously infused in my work, but my work really goes beyond the Arab world or Arab culture. It really engages Western art and the role in which Arab women are used that I find problematic.