Amalia Ortiz is a spoken word performer, songwriter, and playwright. She appeared on three seasons of Def Poetry on HBO and the NAACP Image Awards on FOX. She was awarded the 2020 American Book Award for Oral Literature. NBC Latino listed her book, Rant. Chant. Chisme. among “10 Great Latino Books of 2015.” It won the 2015 Writers' League of Texas Poetry Discovery Prize. Amalia was chosen to speak at TEDx McAllen 2015. She is a CantoMundo Fellow, a Hedgebrook writer-in-residence alumna, and she was the inaugural performing-artist-in-residence at ArtPace in 2018.She won an Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Grant, a residency at the National Hispanic Cultural Center and the 2018 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant to film videos for songs from her last book The Canción Cannibal Cabaret and other Songs. She was awarded a City of San Antonio Individual Artist Grant to write new work for her latest album, Diatribas Punk. Amalia and the band Las Hijas de la Madre were awarded a Democratizing Racial Justice Grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2024. Amalia received her MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.