Georgetown University’s LGBTQ Resource Center and English department launched the Ricardo L. Ortiz Speaker Series — a poetry seminar featuring LGBTQ+ authors named in honor of humanities professor Ricardo Ortiz, who died in August 2025 — on Feb. 20.
The series’ first event included a poetry workshop and reading featuring Cameron Awkward-Rich, a poet and professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Ortiz, long celebrated by the Georgetown community as an advocate for the humanities and students from marginalized communities, first began planning the speaker series with the LGBTQ Center and English department prior to his death.
Lionell Daggs III, the director of the LGBTQ Center, said Ortiz’s academic work, especially his work in Latine queer studies, inspired the series.
“After attending Ricardo’s memorial service and seeing how many folks he impacted during his time at Georgetown, I started to think of ways the LGBTQ Resource Center could directly honor his legacy,” Daggs wrote to The Hoya. “His commitment to mentorship, queer scholarship and historic support of the center and LGBTQ students all dovetailed really beautifully with the intentions of the program series.”
Awkward-Rich said he helped students through poetry exercises at the event.
“We just read poems together, responded to the prompts together,” Awkward-Rich told The Hoya. “It was really cool and interesting, given that for some people it was the first time that they had been in a poetry workshop, and for some people it was kind of old hat.”
Awkward-Rich’s book, “The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment,” was awarded the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies and the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in LGBTQ literature and cultural studies. He has also published three poetry collections.
Macky Grimm (COL ’21, GRD ’27), a graduate assistant at the LGBTQ Center, said the speaker series’ writing workshop component is particularly helpful for students.
“I do hopefully want to publish one day, but I also think that it would be great for people that just use it as a cathartic experience and to write for the sake of writing,” Grimm told The Hoya.
“I hope that we bring in a lot more intersectional speakers, which connects back to the work that Professor Ortiz did, connecting a lot of marginalized identities with his writing and his advocacy,” Grimm added.
The Center plans on hosting about two more authors this semester, according to Grimm.
Sivagami Subbaraman, the former director of the LGBTQ Resource Center and a close friend to Ortiz, said that while the center’s work supporting queer students is important, LGBTQ+ studies must also be championed as an academic field.
“There is a whole discipline around it, that there’s a whole field of knowledge around it, that it is at its core, it is an academic enterprise,” Subbaraman told The Hoya. “It is not often very clear in Georgetown, because Georgetown does not have an LGBT studies major or minor. There are faculty who teach classes right, like we teach classes around sexuality, obviously, but it’s not its own separate thing. So Ricardo, when he was alive, he and I would talk a lot about the importance of sort of emphasizing the academic pieces.”
Subbaraman said Ortiz’s work was revolutionary in the field of LGBTQ+ studies.
“I mean regular students and others didn’t fully understand or comprehend how crucial and critical his research was, particularly in queer Latinx context,” Subbaraman said. “Those of us who followed his research knew how important and path breaking it was.”
Georgetown offers a women and gender studies minor, but does not have an LGBTQ+ studies program. Some other higher education institutions, including the University of Maryland and Dartmouth College, include LGBTQ+ studies as part of wider women, gender and sexuality studies programs.
Daggs said the LGBTQ Resource Center hopes to expand the speaker series to explore themes in the broader field of humanities.
“We hope the recent inaugural event will be the first in a signature program series of the LGBTQ Resource Center,” Daggs wrote. “Our goal is to highlight LGBTQ+ authors as the program continues to grow. My hope is that it can grow and change with the needs of the campus community. Ricardo’s academic foundation was in English and his work expanded more broadly into the humanities later and I think the program series could take that same trajectory.”
Subbaraman said the series’s emphasis on LGBTQ+ studies in academia aligns with much of Ortiz’s work.
“We act as if only gay people have a gender and a sexuality, and make it a flash point,” Subbaraman said. “But the truth is, we all do, and we should all be learning to think critically about it, and especially when you’re 18 to 22, it’s a fundamental piece of who you are. So I think he would be very happy and very pleased. I think he would be very tickled that this is in his honor, because I think this is the kind of stuff that he dreamed of making happen at Georgetown.”
