About
Photo by: Rachel Marie Photography
Naomi Ortiz explores explores how we create connection and meaning for ourselves, others, and the land within states of rapid change. In their poetry, writing, and visual artwork, they emphasize interdependence and spiritual growth.
Their poetry/essay collection, Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice (punctum books, 2023) offers potent insights about the complexity of interdependence, calling readers to deepen their understanding of what it means to witness and love an endangered world.
Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice (Second Edition), offers powerful, thoughtful, transformative insight into self-care for social workers, teachers, community members, students, and organizations. By weaving together social justice activist interviews with personal experiences in class, race, and disability advocacy, Ortiz provides informative tools and strategies for diverse communities on addressing burnout.
Ortiz is also a co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Every Place on the Map is Disabled: Poems and Essays on Disability (Northwestern University Press), along with Camisha L. Jones, Michael Northen, and Travis Chi Wing Lau.
For their work advancing the cultural landscape, Ortiz was selected by the Ford and Mellon Foundations as a 2022 U.S. Artist Disability Futures Fellow. (Supported by United States Artists, the Ford Foundation, and Mellon Foundation.)
Nominated for their multidisciplinary project, Complicating Conversations, Ortiz was awarded a 2021-2023 Reclaiming the US/Mexico Reclaiming the Border Narrative Grant to bring focus to disability and climate action narratives in the borderlands. (Supported by the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC).)
Ortiz is a highly acclaimed speaker and facilitator with a leadership style emphasizing inclusion. They have worked with Split This Rock, the Ford Foundation, Yale University Child Study Center, the National Basketball Association (NBA), the Portland Art Museum, Still Harbor, Syracuse University Burton Blatt Institute, Sierra Pacific Synod, and other groups around the country.
Photo by: Jade Beall
Ortiz is grounded in social justice work through their tenure as Director of the disability justice project, National Kids As Self Advocates and as the former Southern Arizona Director of the anti-violence projects, Help Increase the Peace, and Alternatives to Violence.
They organize with the Southern Arizona based NOPAL Collective.
Ortiz’s non-fiction essays can be found in publications such as, the anthology Resistance and Hope, in POETRY, Geez Magazine, Rooted in Rights, Borderlore, and the Feminist Wire.
Ortiz is a Zoeglossia Poetry Fellow whose poems have been nominated for Best of the Internet and listed on Entropy’s “Best of 2020-2021: Favorite Poems Published Online.” Their poems have been displayed in Downtown Tucson, AZ as part of the Haiku Hike literary competition, as well as published in anthologies and journals, including: Held: Blessings for the Depths, Law and Poetry: Promises from the Preamble, The Ending Hasn’t Happened Yet, We Are Not Your Metaphor: A Disability Poetry Anthology, on Split This Rock Poem of the Week, About Place literary journal, Poems and Numbers, VIDA, Mollyhouse, The Texas Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Apogee, POETRY, BathHouse, and performed at events such as the Disability Pride Parade. Ortiz’s poem “majestic disabled/queer/people of color elders instruct how to dance in the struggle” was named a finalist for the Cid Pearlman Performance dance/video/art installation (home)Body, which premiered at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in January of 2022.
Artwork by Ortiz is part of the permanent collection at the University of Arizona Disability Cultural Center and has been featured in group art shows in Tucson-AZ, Boston-MA, and appears on the covers of Rituals for Climate Change and Sustaining Spirit. Their painting “Resistance Is Fertile” appeared on the July page in the 2022 Syracuse Workers Peace Calendar.
Ortiz’s work has been described as, “cracking apart common beliefs to spill out beauty.” They are a proud Disabled, Mestize (Indigenous/ Latinx/ White) living with their partner and cats in the Arizona U.S./Mexico borderlands.
Author photograph: Rachel Marie Photography