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Naomi Ayala, born July 8,1964, is a teacher, writer and consultant translator. Ayala was raised in Puerto Rico lived her teenage years in New Haven, Connecticut where she continued High School and one year of college. As a poet and writer of English and Spanish works, Ayala’s career has spanned over twenty years. She is author of three books of poetry written in 1997, 2008 and 2014 which has been recognized by numerous public and private organizations as must read.

Life
Naomi Ayala is a writer, teacher and consultant born on July 8, 1964 in New Haven, Connecticut while her parents were visiting from Puerto Rico. A year and a half after her birth, the Ayala family returned to Puerto Rico where she lived until 1978 before returning to New Haven to stay with family. Naomi Ayala completed secondary school and attended Wheaton college for a year before taking time off to see and experience the world. She believed this form of education would help to enhance her writing. During this time, she was a proactive resident of the New Haven community, where she worked at New Haven Cooperative Arts and the Humanities High School as an arts administrator.6 In 1997, Naomi Ayala moved to Washington, D.C taking a position as a coordinator for curriculum and instruction at the center for Community Excellence of the National Council of La Raza.2 She also took on a position as the Program Director for Celebra la Ciencia: The Hispanic Community Science Festivals Project of the Self Reliance Foundation and the Hispanic Radio Network. Ms. Ayala also decided to return to school to further her academic career at Bennington College Writing Seminars, receiving her Masters in Fine Art.6

Literary Contribution
Ayala is most notable for her English and Spanish poetry. She has contributed three books of poetry to the literary world. Many of her poems are published in several literary journals and anthologies around the U.S. including The Village Voice Literary Supplement, The Massachusetts Review, The Caribbean Writer, Callaloo, and Kalliope. She has contributed her talent and voice to The Creative Resistance: Puerto Rican Women in the U.S. for the Third Woman Writer, Red River and Potomac Reviews, Hanging Loose, and Terra Incognita. Ayala published three books of poetry: Wild animals on the Moon, and Other Poems, published 1997, This Side of Early, 2008 and Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations, 2013. Wild Animals on the moon, and Other Poems was chosen by the New York City Public Library 1999 as one of the best Books for Teenagers.2 In 2008 Ayala gave birth to This Side of Early a collection of themes in an ever-changing landscape which takes her readers from the city streets to the meditative solace of the woods.3 Her lyrics reevaluated the political world, offering lyrical, spiritual intimacy, and a bridge of hope to connect the two realms with words full of ecological intensity. Ayala’s latest, Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations goes a step further by examining the world’s energy and magic discovered in unexpected places, skipping from place to place, strategy to strategy, as she navigates the known and unknown.3 Along the way she encounters obstacles of racial, cultural, sexual, class bias, and linguistic identities to arrive at an intersection of infinite possibilities. In so doing, she reveals the lost and discovered. In addition, Naomi Ayala is active in promoting Latino Arts. Naomi Ayala has helped establish New Haven's first International Festival of Arts and Ideas. She was the primary administrator for the Inner-City Cultural Development Project on the Arts as well as the Institute for Community Research, co-founding the New Haven Alliance for Arts and Cultures. Naomi Ayala has also collaborated with other award-winning writers such as Martín Espada whose poems were inspired by his father, on immigrants and working-class families in his works Down These Mean Streets.7 In the summer of 2017 Ayala and Espada read for audiences at the Smithsonian American Art Museum for Latino Art, a proactive socially motivated event bringing about awareness of Latino Literature. In 2017 Naomi Ayala partnered with Poets & Writers, a National Literary Organization, to give voice and reclaim the phrase “melting pot”.4 There Ayala reminds and reinvigorate the audiences’ mind about America the big “Melting Pot” of the world, by partnering with other poets from different parts of the world who brought their talent and voice from across the globe to give their perspective on life issues.5 Throughout her career, Naomi Ayala has performed selections from her personal works to read for poetic, private and public organization to educate, entertain, inspire and raise social awareness.