Naomi Ortiz (they/them) is a multidisciplinary Disabled, Mestize, poet, writer, and visual artist envisioning collective futures in the Arizona U.S./Mexico borderlands. Their work invites people to imagine how relational ways of belonging tend our connections with human and more-than human kin.
Ortiz is a 2026 Arizona Humanities Speaker. They are a 2025-2026 awardee from the Landscape Research Group, for their project, “Heritage Sites and Ceremony from Bed to Land” along with moira williams. For their work advancing the cultural landscape, Ortiz was selected by the Ford and Mellon Foundations as a U.S. Artist Disability Futures Fellow. (Supported by United States Artists.) Nominated for their multidisciplinary project, Complicating Conversations, Ortiz was awarded a 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).) They were also nominated for the 2025 Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities.
Ortiz weaves conocimiento of self-care, disability justice, climate action, and interdependence to explore how we create meaning and build connections within a rapidly changing world. They are the author of Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice, (2023), a poetry/essay collection that 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. Their non-fiction book, a 2018 Southwest Book of the Year, Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice, provides informative tools, insightful strategies, and generative reflection questions for diverse communities on addressing burnout. Ortiz is also a co-editor of the anthology, Every Place on the Map is Disabled: Poems and Essays (2026). Their non-fiction essays can be found in many publications such as, POETRY, Geez Magazine, Borderlore, and Lithub, as well as in numerous anthologies including, Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People and Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire, edited by Alice Wong.
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, and published in anthologies and journals, including: Held: Blessings for the Depths, Law and
Poetry: Promises from the Preamble, Split This Rock Poem of the Week, About Place Literary Journal, Poems and Numbers, VIDA, The Texas Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Apogee, POETRY, as well as, many others. They have performed their poetry at a multitude of events such as the Dodge Poetry Festival (EWR), Tucson Festival of Books (TUC), Allied Media Conference (DTW), Earlham College Border Studies Program (TUC), Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies (SBN) , the Feminism and Poetry Series hosted by Fordham University (NYC), and Women Enabled International 10th Anniversary (DCA). 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 (new name, OMNES Disability Student Space) and has been featured in shows in Tucson-AZ, Boston-MA, and San Francisco-CA. Their paintings appear on book covers, postcards, and in the 2022 Syracuse Workers Peace Calendar. Currently, they are collaborating with moira williams on the “Touch Back In-digi-nality” art project, funded in part by the Emily Hall Tremaine foundation.
They are a highly acclaimed speaker and facilitator with a leadership style emphasizing inclusion. They have worked with the Ford Foundation, Yale University Child Study Center, the National Basketball Association (NBA), and other groups. www.NaomiOrtiz.com
