About the Author
Adriana Páramo is a cultural anthropologist, writer, and women’s rights advocate. Her book My Mother’s Funeral, a non-fiction work set in Colombia, was nominated for the 2014 Latino Books into Movies Award and won the 2016 Etching Press Whirling Prize for Best Coming of Age Book. She also is author of Looking for Esperanza, winner of:
- The Social Justice and Equity Award in Creative Nonfiction.
- Nautilus Silver Award in the conscious media category.
- Best Women’s Issues book at the International Latino Book Award.
- Best Social Studies book at the International Publishers’ Awards.
- Silver medal at the 2013 Book of the Year Award, BOYA.
Looking for Esperanza was also listed as one of the top ten best books by Latino authors in 2012.
She has work featured in The Sun, The Georgia Review, Southern Sin: True Stories of the Sultry South and Women Behaving Badly, Brevity, The Fourth Genre, Columbia: a Journal of Literature and Art, Going Om: a Spiritual anthology. Her essays have won numerous awards and honors, including multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, and have been noted in The Best American Essays of 2012, 2013 and 2014. In 2014, she was named as one of the top ten Latino authors in the USA. Her essay, My Timbuktu, is featured in the 2015 Best American Travel Writing.
Currently, she is an adjunct professor in the low-residency MFA program at Fairfield University, where she was the keynote speaker for the 2016 Hispanic Heritage Month. Adriana is an active member of the travel writing workshop of VONA—Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation—a community of writers of color.
Adriana works in Qatar as a dance and yoga instructor, the former to open women’s hearts to Hispanic culture; the latter to open their shoulders and justify her constant trips to India. Adriana is currently working on a book about the cross-cultural symbolic value of the hymen.