

Born and raised in the Texas Panhandle, mónica teresa ortiz is a poet and writer who explores the relationships between necropolitics, geopolitics, and history. Since childhood, they have been fascinated by the alienation experienced through land and language, and how that translates into the violence we've witnessed over the past 30 years. What might appear as dystopian is actually a hopeful imaginative of our future, marked by current events and shaped by our past. ortiz's work acts as a record, as an act of protest, and a history of the United States, transformed through a critical practice focused on our epoch and their experiences as a Queer Mexican born and raised in the South. They are the author of muted blood, published by Black Radish Books in 2018, and winner of the inaugural Host Publications Chapbook Prize for autobiography of a semiromantic anarchist, published in 2019. They have forthcoming work in the Brooklyn Review, the Texas Observer, and are a featured poet with City of Asylum's Jazz Poetry Festival (2020). ortiz also has had collaborations with NYC based production collective, Tierra Narrative, as well as forthcoming with Libromobile. Funds provided by Co-Lab projects will help ortiz complete a writing residency to focus on their upcoming book Birds at a Funeral as well as afford the cost of the book's completion and curate a zine featuring BIPOC poets of the South.



Read Mónica's recent poems here









Quyen Nguyen