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Raffi Joe Wartanian is a writer, educator, and musician who teaches writing at UCLA and serves as the inaugural Poet Laureate in the City of Glendale, California. He holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University, where he also taught undergraduate writing. During his time in New York, Raffi led writing workshops at Rikers Island Jail, the Manhattan VA, Khrimian Lyceum, and founded Letters for Peace. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from The Fulbright Program, Eurasia Partnership Foundation, Gulbenkian Foundation, and Mellon Foundation among others, and his essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Miami Herald, The Baltimore Sun, Outside Magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere.
An accomplished multi-instrumentalist and composer, Raffi has performed internationally and released two full-length albums of original music. He is the proud 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 the great city of Baltimore.
For more information, visit Raffi’s website.
Updated August 2025