About

Kaya Ortiz is a queer Filipino poet of in/articulate identities and record-keeper of ancient histories. Kaya hails from the southern islands of Mindanao and lutruwita/Tasmania and is obsessed with the fluidity of borders, memory and time.

Starting out in nipaluna’s open mic scene in 2016, Kaya has performed spoken word poetry and oral storytelling in nipaluna/Hobart, Ngunnawal country/Canberra, Tarntanya/Adelaide, and Boorloo/Perth. In 2017 they competed in the Australian Poetry Slam at the local and state levels.

Since first being published in 2018, Kaya’s writing has appeared in various online and print journals and anthologies, including Cordite, Portside Review, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal, Best of Australian Poems 2021, Breathing Space (Tasmanian Land Conservancy 2021) and After Australia (Affirm Press 2020).

In 2019 they were a Hot Desk Fellow at the Centre for Stories in Boorloo and a participant in Express Media’s Toolkits: Poetry program. They were also a participant in Westerly’s 2019 Writers’ Development Program. In 2020, 2021 and 2023, Kaya appeared at various writes festivals, including the Emerging Writers’ Festival, Perth Festival of Literature & Ideas, and the Margaret River Readers and Writers’ Festival. From 2022-23 Kaya was a mentee of the Four Centres Emerging Writers’ Program with WA Poets. In this time they were also awarded with an Emerging Writers’ Fellowship under the Centre for Stories’ Writing Change, Writing Inclusion program, to complete their first collection of poetry.

By day Kaya lives, works and writes on unceded Whadjuk Noongar country, where their name means ‘hello’ in the Noongar language. By night, beside their beloved, they dream of wilderness and the call of the sea.

Photo credits: Ezara Ortiz

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I would like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the land of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation, on which I live and create. I also pay my respects to the elders past, present and emerging, and acknowledge that this is stolen land. Sovereignty has never been ceded. This was and always will be Aboriginal land.