A long time ago Lisa Allen Ortiz was born in the wilds of Northern California. Since then she’s had a nice life which means she reads a lot of books and hikes and runs around in forests. She birthed and raised two daughters. They grew very tall and courageous and moved away. Ortiz still finds the daughters’ father good-looking and interesting, so she continues to live with him in Santa Cruz, California where he was raised. She 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 Catamaran Literary Reader, Colorado Review and The Literary Review among other places. She is co-translator with Sara Rivera of The Blinding Star, selected poems of the Peruvian poet Blanca Varela, a book which won the 2021 Northern California Book Award for Poetry in Translation.