Edwin Rivera-Arias is a Cuban Colombian playwright and fiction writer who hails from a working-class New Jersey background. He is a resident playwright with New Dramatists (2024-2031). He was awarded a 2024 Prose Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and residencies from Willapa Bay AiR, the Blue Mountain Center, Dramatic Question Theatre, The New Jersey Play Lab, and Art House Production’s INKubator Program. 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, and a second-rounder in the
Austin Film Festival Competition (Stage Play category). In 2019 his first play, In the Palace of the Planet King, was staged at The Wild Project. His stories and poems have been published in The Evening Street Review, The Global City Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pank, Kweli, The Acentos Review, The Florida Review, & Another Chicago Magazine, among other publications. He is a former member of the United Steelworkers (Local 4-406), and have devoted three years of his life to organizing, where as one of the leaders in the movement he helped to bring a labor union to The School of Visual Arts in New York, where he taught literature & writing as an adjunct for the last thirteen years. In May of this year, he was awarded The Lippmann Family “New Frontier” Award for Travel. He’s written four dramas that explore the Latino & Latin American experience, and he wants to fail better than Beckett ever did.