Born in El Salvador, Ortiz emigrated to the United States during childhood and settled with her family in Northern California.
[2] Ortiz has taught creative writing to young adults and screenwriting to undergraduates at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
[5] Ortiz has been published in City of Stairways: A Poet's Field Guide to San Francisco [6]), Teaching Artist Journal, and has created a self-published chapbook, Encantadas with Las Manas Tres.
[7] Mirrors, written by Ortiz and published by the Teaching Artist Journal in 2011, explores what it was like for Ortiz to go from learning English just six months after emigrating to the United States at eight-years-old, to then go on to teach English as a second language to recently arrived immigrants.
She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona and is the Marketing and Outreach Director for Borderlands Theatre Company.