Christopher Sablan Diaz

Christopher Sablan Diaz is a CHamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan. As a writer, performer, and photographer, he’s been featured by NBC News, Poets & Writers.org, and was shortlisted for the 2026 Poet of the Year Award by ONLY POEMS literary magazine. He’s recently been appointed as the 2026-2027 Poetry Coalition Fellow for Indigenous Nations Poets via the Academy of American Poets.

He’s received additional fellowships and support from Kundiman, the McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House), the Washington State Arts Commission, and the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology. He’s taught with “Writers in the Schools” in Houston, TX, and is a two-time grand slam champion. In 2023, he and his PNW teammates won the Bigfoot Regional Poetry Slam competition.

While he’s spent more than ten years competing in, organizing, and coaching slam poetry, he’s spent the last several years laser-focused on honing his craft for the page. As an anti-imperialist veteran who’s been reconnecting with his indigenous language and culture, his work often explores the grief of assimilation, military identity deconstruction, intergenerational trauma, and constructs of masculinity.

He’s eternally grateful to the many poetry communities who have helped shape his politics, poetics, and literary citizenship. He lives on the unceded ancestral lands of the Chinook in Vancouver, WA, where he volunteers to co-facilitate writing workshops at the juvenile detention center. He is currently working on his first poetry collection, one poem at a time.