“It is possible to hold a multiplicity of selves inside one person,” says Pittsburgh author Adriana Ramírez. “I feel like, even though I’m 40, I’ve lived many lives.”
To date, those lives have included incarnations as a published poet, essayist and literary critic, university professor, op-ed columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and former “Jeopardy!” contestant.
Born in Mexico City and raised in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, Ramírez’ family roots extend to Colombia and the Sephardic Jewish community of medieval Spain.
While attending Rice University in Houston, she discovered the high-energy genre of slam poetry and spent several years on the slam poetry circuit as a tournament coordinator and nationally ranked poet-performer.
Ramírez arrived in Pittsburgh in 2006 to pursue a masters of fine arts in Nonfiction Writing at the University of Pittsburgh, where her academic research provided the basis for “Dead Boys,” a nonfiction novella that won the prestigious PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize.
In 2015 she received a City of Asylum Pittsburgh Prize/Passa Porta Residency in Brussels, Belgium; in 2019 she was awarded the Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Award for an Established Artist by the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Heinz Endowments.
She also found time to co-found the “Aster(ix)” literary journal with Pitt professor and novelist Angie Cruz, organize the Young Steel poetry slam league in Brookline and teach a monthly poetry workshop at August Wilson House.
And she has written an upcoming book, “The Violence.”
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NEXTpittsburgh: You are socially and artistically conversant in several cultures. How do you think this surfaces in your creative writing?
Adriana Ramírez: I grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, which is a place of Spanglish and working class and accordion music and the intersection of the polkas from central Texas intersecting with the polkas of northern Mexico. Believe it or not, there’s actually kind of a wild heavy metal scene. The border is always in flux. It’s a place that taught me a lot about linguistic code-switching.
A lot of people of my generation who grew up in this place — especially those of us with parents who spoke Spanish — have the ability to switch between well-educated Spanish, street Spanish, street Spanglish, street English and educated English. To communicate with people on their level is definitely something that growing up on the border taught me and that I’ve carried with me throughout my entire life.
NEXTpittsburgh: When you started writing, you had those voices ready to draw upon.
Ramírez: I was the kid with the notebook. I was always writing dramatic poetry. I’ve always been writing. I’ve always loved language. I’ve always been a voracious reader. I fell in love with A.A. Milne in third grade. He has a collection of poetry called “When We Were Very Young,” and I memorized almost every poem in there. My friends in high school made fun of me. They said I had Sylvia Plath Voice.
My first byline was writing for the college newspaper. I started reviewing opera and ballet and theater. That’s where my deep, deep love of criticism and book critics and being a cultural critic comes from. Then one day during my sophomore year I went to a poetry slam, and it changed my life.
NEXTpittsburgh: Poetry can do that.
Ramírez: There was a kid named Rassul Zarinfar, a half-Persian, half-rural kid from Maine. He got on the table and did a slam poem. It was “Motor Red, Motor White, Motor Blue” by Phil West. It was just incredible. And I remember thinking, “I could do that.” So I tried out for the Rice Poetry Slam Team and in my very first poetry slam got third place and earned a spot on the team.
NEXTpittsburgh: You were a competitive slam poet and then an organizer?
Ramírez: I became a host and eventually one of the tournament directors and game designers of the Poetry Slam. I designed the format for the individual World Poetry Slam, how it was going to work and how people would compete.
When I moved to Pittsburgh for graduate school, one of the very first things I did was contact the local poetry slam folks. I had already met them at various events around the country, and so it was really easy to come to Pittsburgh because I had a kind of built-in social network.
NEXTpittsburgh: When you’re creating slam poems, how do you find your “slam voice?” Do you think of a particular person speaking the words? Or does it depend on the specific poem?
Ramírez: Each poem has its own voice, its own character, its own structure. E.B. White in “The Elements of Style” says to find a form and stick to it. That’s how I think about it. I think of a piece of writing and I go, “OK, what kind of poem is this?” I start writing and see where it goes. And then I think, “This is going to be for page. It’s more meditative, and I want people to be able to read the words, to stop, to linger, to consider enjambment, all of that. Or I’m like, “Oooh! This is going to be a lot of fun to read out loud. So, who is this person?”
I was really in love with poets like Robert Browning. You’re always taught that those were dramatic monologues, right? A poem like “My Last Duchess” where you realize it’s got character, it’s got a form, and that form very much hinges on voice.
I also love confessional poetry, and so confessional poetry, dramatic monologue, a little bit of theater plays in. It feels fun, and when you write for performance, you’re writing and imagining what it’s going to sound like and how you’re going to deliver it. You think about pacing in a very different way.
I have a poem I do called “Diva’s Prayer.” It’s a found poem partially collected from lyrics from Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse songs. When I perform that poem, I’m a little sloppy on stage, but on purpose, you know? I love to play with monotones and thinking about a lot of experimental, one-act plays I’ve seen in my life and how different layering things can happen.
NEXTpittsburgh: Have you collaborated with other slam poets?
Ramírez: Yes, in poetry slam you can have group pieces. I met my husband, Jesse Welch, at the national poetry slam. He was on Team Seattle, and I was on Team Pittsburgh. Eventually we were both on Team Pittsburgh, and we did a poem called “Police Story” that is a found poem of police reports. We stitched it together in a way we call “Phillip Glass-style”, but it’s actually a reference to “Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread” by David Ives.
When we perform “Police Story,” it becomes a tornado of phrases used in police reports — “suspect apprehended,” “suspect caught” and so on — building to a moment where all three voices in the poem are saying, “It wasn’t my fault.”
It’s a tornado of language, and while you can try to re-create it on the page, you’ll never get it to have the same aural quality the ephemeral performance will always have. Even watching it on YouTube, it’s never going to be as thrilling as being in the room and feeling that electricity. That’s something that’s very addictive about slam.
NEXTpittsburgh: You have a new book coming out in 2025 on Scribner. What is it about?
Ramírez: In Colombia, there was a civil war called The Violence that began in 1948 and lasted until 1956. But the seeds of violence planted during that civil war grew into later guerrilla groups like FARC and M19 and ELN. Colombians are a very happy people in a very violent country. I started thinking, “What is the nature of violence?”
The book is called “The Violence,” and it is a story of my Colombian grandma beginning in 1948 and ending in the mid-1990s. It tells how she survived all this violence over time. It’s structured like “The Grapes of Wrath” with interstitial chapters. And it’s all nonfiction. Over the course of my three-year MFA at Pitt and the subsequent 10 years I’ve been working on this, I have weirdly become an expert on this time period and on this conflict.
NEXTpittsburgh: Is Pittsburgh a good city for new poetry?
Ramírez: I love Pittsburgh’s poetry scene, partly because it is a niche culture and has a really interesting way of allowing things to develop. Some of the Black open mics taking place in Wilkinsburg, for example. There’s the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, which is very much about elevating the discourse around African-American and African diaspora voices. And City of Asylum, which has done a lot of work with refugees but also jazz poetry.
I think Pittsburgh can only benefit from a variety of voices, from a variety of stories, from a variety of points of view. It took me a while to find my comfort places in the city, but visiting different open mics and talking to different poets was great way to start.
One of the nice things about Pittsburgh is the many organizations that really care about writing. City of Asylum is spearheading a campaign to apply for a designation for Pittsburgh as a UNESCO City of Literature. I firmly believe we really are a city of literature.
