Diaries, Dreams, and Excavations with Wendy C. Ortiz

Thursday, October 22, 2026 at 4:30 PM

Crookshank Hall

WENDY C. ORTIZ is a writer of creative nonfiction who works in hybrid forms, essays, and memoir. She is the author of Excavation: A Memoir; Hollywood Notebook, and Bruja: A Dreamoir, all of which were reprinted by Northwestern University Press in 2025. A darkly vibrant and daring memoir, Ortiz’s Excavation challenged the standard telling of abuse narratives when first published in 2014; over a decade later, it remains deeply prescient. Set in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley in the late 1980s, the narrative follows the spiraling entanglement between Wendy and her eighth-grade English teacher as she becomes both victim to and participant in a simultaneously predatorial and impassioned relationship. Ortiz’s writing has also appeared in Pleiades, BOMB Magazine online, Joyland, The New York Times, Fence, and many other journals. In 2016 Bustle named Wendy one of “9 Women Writers Who Are Breaking New Nonfiction Territory.” Ortiz is a therapist in private practice in Los Angeles. Her current project is the weekly newsletter Mommy’s El Camino.

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