Interview: Embodying Ambiguity with Kaya Ortiz
(Damsel Magazine, September 2025)
“Language, then, was liberation, and yet words are still only approximations, and sometimes become another mould to fit into. In terms of gender, for example: woman / nonbinary / trans masc / butch / lesbian…As words their boundaries feel fixed, much like bodies do, but language (like gender) is allowed to be more fluid than that.”
Interview: Award-winning author Kaya Ortiz on their writing process and inspirations
(UWAP Blog, 28 March 2025)
Winner of the 2024 Dorothy Hewett Award, Kaya Ortiz’s debut book Past & Parallel Lives forms a story of growth and identity, woven together with themes of time. In this interview, Kaya speaks with UWAP intern Maria Kakani on the process of curating their poetry collection and the evolution of their writing journey
Interview with Kaya Ortiz, winner of the 2024 Dorothy Hewett Award
(UWAP Blog, 30 August 2024)
”Past and Parallel Lives is longing and time and being split open and cleaved apart. It’s being haunted by everything but mostly just yourself. It’s every night you’ve laid awake flicking through the past like a photo album, picturing every crossroads branching off into parallel lives you’ll never live.”
Interview: DHA Shortlist
(UWAP Blog, June 11 2024)
Past and Parallel Lives by Kaya Ortiz is a coming-of-age unpublished poetry collection that is shortlisted for the 2024 Dorothy Hewett Award. In this mini-interview, Ortiz shares what it feels like to be shortlisted, and explores the collection’s inspiration and writing process.
Interview #162: Kaya Ortiz
(LIMINAL Mag, 8 Feb 2021)
“I write because I have something to say, and poetry for me is the best way to say it. It allows me to be in control of language, to be clear or ambiguous, to be vulnerable and honest, and to let go of my incessant need to be completely understood. It allows me to be known, and yet not known.”
Strange New White World
(Portside Review, Issue One, March 2021)
A creative nonfiction story of colonisation, migration and assimilation, told in vignettes and intercut with history lessons and scenes from Star Trek: The Next Generation: “You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”
The Opposite of Pain
(Centre for Stories’ Journal, 2 October 2020)
‘I’m shedding my armour for badges of honour, rainbow flags waving high. I’m uncovering shame and embracing pride and love in its place. After all, what is pride, if not the opposite of shame? And what is love, if not the opposite of pain?’
A Queer and Quiet Resistance
(Singapore Review of Books, 18 December 2019)
A review of Sergius Seeks Bacchus, the debut poetry collection by Indonesian writer and poet Norman Erikson Pasaribu, translated into English by Tiffany Tsao. The collection offers a quiet but rigid resistance against that world’s desire to maim the queer spirit.
“Where the water flows down”: Wounds of Heritage and Home
(Empty Mirror, 13 December 2019)
A review of Flood Damages, the debut poetry collection by Eunice Andrada. This collection is the scar left by diaspora – home is made a gaping wound, language made a border. In the end, all that remains is water and flood damages.
KAYA ORTIZ 