Mario Aguirre

Adriana V. López is a writer and editor based in New York City. She edited and contributed to the recent story collection, Fifteen Candles: 15 Tales of Taffeta, Hairspray, Drunk Uncles and Other Quinceañera Stories (HarperCollins, 2007). Young novelists such as Felicia Luna Lemus, Michael Jaime Becerra, and Angie Cruz were among some of the contributors to the collection. López’s first novella, Don’t Be Mad at Me, appeared in Juicy Mangoes (Simon & Schuster, 2007), a literary erotica collection of seven Latin American and Latina writers edited by Michelle Herrera Mulligan.  The collection includes the works of Marya Montero (translated by Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa’s English-language translator, Edith Grossman), Mayra Santos Febres and Yxta Mayra Murray, amongst others.

Her creative writing has appeared in anthologies such as Border-Line Personalities: A New Generation of Latinas Dish on Sex, Sass & Cultural Shifting (HarperCollins, 2004), Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (Seal Press, 2002) and Hopscotch: Latin American Cultural Review (Duke University Press, 2000) edited by Ilan Stavans. 

López attended Columbia University’s School of Journalism from 2000-2002 and her writings on arts and literature have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Time Out New York, Black Book, among other publications.

She was the founding Editor of Críticas magazine (www.criticasmagazine.com), Publishers Weekly’s sister publication, written in English, on the Spanish- language publishing world and served as the spokesperson for the Association of American Publisher’s (AAP) Latino Voices for America initiative. She served as interim Editorial Director at Random House’s Vintage Español in the fall and winter of 2004-2005 and currently translates for their Barcelona offices. She has been invited to speak at numerous international and national book fairs on trends in Spanish, Latin American, and Latino letters and was voted one of the 100 most influential Latinos in the arts by Latino Impact in 2002 and was featured in Poder magazine’s “Guru” page in 2004.

Born and raised in New York in 1972, as the only child of Colombian immigrants, López has always kept a fascinated eye looking towards her family’s roots in Latin America and Spain. When she entered college at the University at Albany in 1990, she majored in both Spanish and English literatures, reading Cervantes and Joyce with great fervor, knowing that she wanted to work with crafting words, bridging cultures, and cultivating new ideas. Upon graduating she embarked on a publishing career where she first contributed to magazines in New York that hired her to write and edit articles about Latino popular culture. During her free time, she joined a progressive organization of women of color writers called W.I.L.L, Women in Literature and Letters, where she met other like- minded New York writers, like Angie Cruz, Nelly Rosario, Edwidge Danticat, who shared immigrant experiences and shared a passion for writing.  Through the support of NYU’s Creative Writing Dept and writers and activists such as Sharon Olds and Grace Paley, WILL assembled writing seminars and forums to inspire other minority women to keep writing as an everyday part of their lives.

As a freelance writer, editor and translator, she keeps herself busy with words. She is also a translator of fiction and non-fiction, as well as cinema having recently translated the script for Colombian director Harold Trompetero’s feature-film debut, Riverside. López also contributes to the book page at Latina magazine and is a blog columnist for Críticas' online magazine on Spanish-language and Latino literature.

She's currently compiling a story collection entitled Barcelona Noir for Akashic Books' award winning City Noir fiction series forthcoming in 2009. López is also at work researching and writing a historical novel on female bullfighters of 19th century Spain.