Adriana Páramo – författare

A collection that explores the space between personal loss and collective crisis The essays in Between What Was and What Is address timely questions of power, identity, history, and resilience. Ranging from intimate personal reflection to global crisis, Adriana Páramo examines the contradictions and tensions that define how we live—and how we make sense of what we've lived through. Grounded in the present moment, Páramo engages directly with current events: the death of Pope Francis and the debates about reform his passing has reopened, and the ongoing devastation of the war in Ukraine. She grapples with the lasting weight of colonial, familial, and national trauma, and with the experience of returning to a homeland that no longer matches memory. These essays enter a broader conversation about the liberation of brown and Latina women—voices frequently pushed to the margins of predominantly white feminist spaces. She asks what drives people to persist in the face of systemic inequality. An encounter with a Kumari Devi in Nepal becomes an occasion to examine faith, ritual, and the assumptions we bring to spiritual experience. Throughout, Páramo moves between the everyday and the sacred to interrogate how culture and identity are lived and inherited. From personal reflections on age, feminism, and rebuilding after failure to larger examinations of race and systemic oppression, Between What Was and What Is asks readers to engage seriously with difficult realities. It takes stock of what we inherit, what we survive, and what we carry forward.

Keeping Quiet is a combination of the anthropologist’s keen eye and the language of a storyteller.In Keeping Quiet, Páramo has collected essays addressing what it is like to live in a world of silence or the absence thereof. This collection covers a wide range of angles and experiences, from an exploration of IBM’s anechoic chamber—the world’s quietest place— to stories of incest, marriage, sexual harassment, social justice, and first-person accounts of life in the emirate of Qatar. Páramo crosses the borders between art (Mozart, Monet, Beethoven, Sheila Chandra, Neruda) and yoga, between research and drunkenness, between despair and triumph, weaving the intimate and personal with what is upsetting in women’s health industry. In “Belated Comebacks,” Páramo is full of righteous anger; in “Teaching Mom Long Division,” she explores the oceanic depths of longing; in “Writers of Color,” she examines the complexities of being brown and speaking accented English; in “Three Women,” she exposes the social underbelly of Qatar during the pandemic, then mixes it all with personal reckonings.