Lisa Allen Ortiz (MFA 2014 Pacific University) is the author of  Stem, winner of the 2021 Idaho Prize and Guide to the Exhibit winner of the 2016 Perugia Press Prize. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Bennington Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Colorado Review and The Literary Review. She is co-translator with Sara Rivera of The Blinding Star, Selected Poems of Blanca Varela, which won the 2021 Northern California Book Award for Poetry in Translation. She was born a long time ago in the wilds of Northern California and now lives in Santa Cruz.