Jorge Ortega

Jorge Ortega (Mexicali, 1972) is one of Mexico’s leading contemporary poets.  He has published over a dozen collections of poetry and essays in Mexico, Argentina, Spain, and the United States.  Among his poetry collections, one should mention Ajedrez de polvo (tsé-tsé, Argentina: 2003), Estado del tiempo (Hiperión, Madrid: 2005), and Devoción por la piedra, which won the coveted Premio Internacional de Poesía Jaime Sabines in 2010, published by CONECULTA and the fine arts council of Chiapas, Mexico.   His poetry and essays have also appeared in such journals as Crítica, Letras Libres, Nexos, The Bitter Oleander, The Black Herald, Poetry International, and The International Poetry Review.  Although Ortega has lived on the border in the northern desert of Mexico, his poetry alludes to both the country’s border and the realities of contemporary Mexico and Mexican Spanish, as well as remaining deeply entrenched in the Baroque, Neo-Baroque, and avant-garde traditions of Spanish language poetry.  He is a noted critic and scholar of Latin American and Iberian poetry, and he completed his PhD in Hispanic Philology at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.  Ortega is also a translator of North American and Catalan poetry, and he has published translations of such poets as Hart Crane and Ezra Pound.   Ortega currently resides in his native city where he is a professor at CETYS University, and where he also edits the university’s journal Arquetipos.