Rio Cortez

Rio Cortez writes American poetry and books for children whose writing connects family history, landscape, and Black life in the West. Golden Ax, published by Penguin Books in 2022, is her first complete poetry collection. The poems move between Salt Lake City, ancestral memory, motherhood, popular culture, faith, plants, and imagined futures, building what Cortez calls an exploration of Afropioneerism. Her family roots among early Black settlers in Utah give the collection a specific regional foundation, while its shifts in voice and form keep history in conversation with the present. Golden Ax was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry and received further recognition from PEN America and the Poetry Society of America. Cortez had previously published the chapbook I Have Learned to Define a Field as a Space Between Mountains and the picture book The ABCs of Black History. Across those forms, she combines archival attention with lyrical invention. Golden Ax brings that method into an expansive, witty, and carefully structured poetic study of inheritance and possibility.