Edwin Rivera-Arias

Edwin Rivera-Arias is a Cuban-Colombian playwright and fiction writer.  He received a 2024 Prose Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a 2024 Soho House Fellowship. Rivera-Arias was a Norman Mailer Fiction Fellow (2011), twice a recipient of the Willapa Bay AiR residency (2016 & 2024) and a resident at the Blue Mountain Center (2024). He was also a resident at The New Jersey Play Lab & Art House Production's INKubator Program in 2022-2023, and was in residence with Dramatic Question Theatre in 2024. In 2019 his play, In the Palace of the Planet King, was staged at The Wild Project. Rivera-Arias's stories and poems have been published in The Evening Street Review, The Global City Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pank, Kweli, The Acentos Review & Another Chicago Magazine, among other publications. He was a finalist for the Judith Royer Excellence in Playwriting Award, the Baylor New Playwriting Initiative, the 2025 Blue Ink Award, and the 47th Bay Area Playwrights Festival--all for his play Stubbornness & Bone. Rivera-Arias was a former member of the United Steelworkers (Local 4-406). In May of 2025 he was awarded The Lippmann Family "New Frontier" Award For Travel.