Instructor

Adriana E. Ramirez

Adriana E. Ramírez is a Mexican-Colombian writer, critic, and performance poet based in Pittsburgh. She won the inaugural PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize in 2015 for her novella-length work of nonfiction, Dead Boys (Little A, 2016), and from 2016 to 2020 she served as critic at large for the Los Angeles Times Books section. The recipient of the 2019 established artist Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Award, her work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ESPN’s The Undefeated, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, PEN America, and Literary Hub. Once a nationally ranked slam poet, she founded the infamous Nasty Slam in Pittsburgh and continues to perform on stages around the country. She and novelist Angie Cruz founded Aster(ix) Journal, a literary journal giving voice to the censored and the marginalized. Ramírez is the author of the poetry collection The Swallows (Blue Sketch Press, 2016) and coedited the anthology In the Shadow of the Mic (Bridge & Tunnel Books, 2020). She is the cohost of the City of Asylum and Aster(ix) Journal podcast, Charla Cultural. Her debut full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, is forthcoming from Scribner.