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). Rivera-Arias was awarded a 2024 Prose Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, The Lippmann Family “New Frontier” Award for Travel in 2025, and residencies from Willapa Bay AiR, the Blue Mountain Center, Dramatic Question Theatre, The New Jersey Play Lab, Art House Production’s INKubator Program, and the Norman Mailer Center. He was a finalist for the Judith Royer Excellence in Playwriting Award, the Baylor New Playwriting Initiative, the 2025 Blue Ink Award, the 47th Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and he was 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 as part of the Downtown Urban Arts Festival. 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 is one of the key organizers of the faculty union at the School of Visual Arts. His short play, Fried Live Skin, has been selected for the Downtown Urban Arts Festival, and will be featured in June of 2026 at La MaMa.