Adriana E. Ramírez is an award-winning Mexican-Colombian writer, critic, columnist, 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). From 2016-2020 she served as Critic-at-Large for the Los Angeles Times Book Section. She is the recipient of the Pittsburgh Foundation’s 2019 Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Award.
Her work has also appeared in The Atlantic, the Boston Globe, ESPN’s The Undefeated (now Andscape), the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, PENAmerica, and Literary Hub. She used to write 45-word book reviews for People Magazine.
Ramírez has won local and national awards for her work as a columnist and book critic for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where she is also the editor of InReview and a member of the editorial board.
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 poetry collection The Swallows (Blue Sketch Press 2016) and co-edited the anthology In the Shadow of the Mic (Bridge & Tunnel Books 2020). She was the co-host of the 2021-2022 City of Asylum/Aster(ix) Journal podcast, Charla Cultural. Her poetry and essays have been translated into Spanish and Flemish.
Her debut full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, is forthcoming from Scribner.
Books
Contact
Adriana E. Ramírez is currently represented by Bonnie Nadell at the Hill Nadell Literary Agency.
To contact the writer directly, message aramirez[at]post-gazette[dot]com.