Kaya Ortiz

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. Their writing has appeared in Portside Review, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal, Best of Australian Poems 2021 and After Australia (Affirm Press 2020), among others. Winner of the 2024 Dorothy Hewett Award, their poetry collection Past & Parallel Lives is forthcoming from UWAP in 2025. Kaya lives and writes on unceded Whadjuk Noongar country, where their name means ‘hello’ in the Noongar language.