Raffi Joe Wartanian

Raffi Joe Wartanian is a writer, musician, and educator. He is the grandson and great-grandson of Armenian genocide survivors, the son of Armenian parents from Lebanon, and, with his siblings, the first generation in his family to be born in the United States, in Baltimore. He received a BA in history from Johns Hopkins University, as well as an MFA in writing and an MA in international affairs from Columbia University, where he taught in the Undergraduate Writing Program.

Wartanian’s poetry has appeared in No, Dear magazine, The Poetry Lighthouse, and Ararat Magazine, among other publications. His essays have been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Miami Herald, the Baltimore Sun, Lapham’s Quarterly, Outside Magazine, and elsewhere. 
 
A multi-instrumentalist, composer, lyricist, and singer-songwriter, he has performed internationally and released two full-length albums of original music. His latest work of instrumental compositions is Critical Distance. Recently, the film company Oscilloscope Laboratories asked Wartanian to compose trailer music for 2021 adventure-drama The Tale of King Crab. In 2023, tracks from Critical Distance were used to soundtrack a production of William Saroyan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, The Time Of Your Life, staged by the University of California, Los Angeles’s department of theater. 

Wartanian is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, Eurasia Partnership Foundation, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and Humanity in Action. 

Wartanian has taught writing to veterans at the Veterans Affairs New York Harbor Healthcare System, to incarcerated writers at Rikers Island, and with Letters for Peace, a program he founded that organized hybrid workshops to foster constructive dialogue between youth in Armenia and Azerbaijan. For PST ART, he collaborated with creative technologists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on “Earth Speaks,” an interactive poetry installation fueled by planetary data for the group showcase Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary Imagination at the Brand Library & Art Center from September 2024 to January 2025. He previously worked for the International Rescue Committee’s Baltimore field office and currently serves on the advisory board of the International Armenian Literary Alliance. A professor of writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, he serves as the inaugural poet laureate of Glendale, California.