Mia Ruiz

Mia Ruiz is a first generation, Peruvian-American poet who worked in the Bay Area for 25 years as a psychiatric social worker during the wax and wane of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. She currently lives in the beautifully biodiverse, geographically chaotic, complicated county of Lake, CA. She lives with her beloved in front of Clear Lake (one of the oldest freshwater lakes in California (whose basin has been inhabited by the diverse Pomo people for at least 11,000 years) and the ‘dormant’volcano, Mt. Konocti (whose threat of eruption was elevated to “high” risk in 2018). Some of her poems were published in the two anthologies titled Resilience and Restore compiled through Middletown Art Center after the recent firestorms.