Adriana E. Ramírez is an American writer and critic of Mexican and Colombian descent. Her writing addresses the history and culture of violence in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States.[1]
In 2015, she won the PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize for Dead Boys.[2] The manuscript was subsequently published as Dead Boys: A Memoir in 2016 by Little A, an imprint of Amazon Publishing. Her debut full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, was acquired by Scribner and is forthcoming.[3] In 2019, she received a grant of $10,000 from investing in professional artists, a joint project of the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Heinz Endowments; she also received that year's established artist Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Award from the Pittsburgh Foundation.[4] The grant describes The Violence as "a book on the history of violence in the Americas, from Pittsburgh to Colombia and back, blending family oral histories with larger national narratives."[5]
In 2024, Ramírez won the Society for Features Journalism Division 2 award for Excellence-in-Features Journalism for General Commentary, for her column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and was a finalist for Arts & Culture Criticism.[6]
She co-founded the literary journal Aster(ix) with Angie Cruz in 2013 and continues to serve as publisher.[7] Beginning in 2016, she served as a critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times.[8] She competed on Jeopardy! in 2022, an experience she subsequently wrote about for The Atlantic.[9]