Raffi Joe Wartanian

Raffi Joe Wartanian is a writer, musician, and educator who teaches writing at UCLA and serves as the inaugural Poet Laureate in the City of Glendale, California. A 2025-2026 Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Community Poetics is a public poetry practice inviting individuals of all ages, backgrounds, languages, and writing levels to voluntarily receive a prompt customized for LitFest, and to submit any piece of writing or illustration representing authentic self-expression in that moment. Then, SGV Phoenix Poets will compile all entries into a single poem (lightly edited) to present a collective voice in our anthology.