Columbus lost one of its brightest literary voices this week with the death of Tomás Miriti Pacheco, a poet, essayist and journalist who built deep ties between the city’s spoken word scene and the wider literary world.
News of his passing spread quickly across social media on the morning of June 17, with friends, mentors, and fellow writers from Ohio to New York sharing memories of a young man many described as a generational talent.
The first public confirmation came from poet Scott Woods, who said he had just been told of the death by Pacheco’s mother. Woods wrote that he had booked Pacheco for a performance next month and had hugged him only three days earlier. He called Pacheco an enormous talent whose loss left the entire community reeling.
A Mentor’s Tribute
Among the most personal tributes came from acclaimed writer Hanif Abdurraqib, who first saw Pacheco perform as a high school student at a Columbus City Schools poetry slam in 2017.
The two later became close after Pacheco was accepted into the Kenyon Young Writers program, where Abdurraqib taught.
In a lengthy post, Abdurraqib described Pacheco as someone who believed he could distill enormous ideas into a single sentence or a few lines, and often did. He wrote that Pacheco had reshaped his own understanding of mentorship, pushing him to see it as a lifelong, mutual commitment rather than something a person simply ages out of.
Abdurraqib said he would never leave Pacheco behind, even now, and urged others who loved him to honor what he called the blueprint of the life Pacheco lived.
Pacheco grew up immersed in Columbus’s poetry world, drawing inspiration as a middle schooler from the documentary Louder Than a Bomb before competing himself in local slams under poets like Sidney Jones.
He went on to study English and creative writing at the University of Chicago, and his work later appeared in national outlets including PEN America and The Nation, where he served as a Puffin StudentNation fellow.
Remembered in Two Cities
The Poetry Cauldron, a longtime Columbus open mic series, wrote that Pacheco embodied everything the community strives to be, noting that praise for his talent was always paired with praise for how kind, empathetic, and funny he was. Organizers said neither he nor his art would be forgotten there.
After relocating to New York, Pacheco became a familiar presence at SupaDupaFresh, a Brooklyn reading series, where organizer Adam Falkner remembered him as a light every time he walked through the door, calling him as gracious off the mic as he was powerful on it.
Writer Caroline Rothstein and others echoed that sentiment in the comments, with several calling his presence in the city’s reading circuit a gift.
Friends and colleagues from across the literary world, including writer Pranav Jani and members of the Columbus poetry scene who had known Pacheco since childhood, also shared condolences, many noting how widely his influence had spread despite his young age.
No cause of death has been publicly shared, and family members have not yet released formal funeral arrangements. Tributes continued to pour in throughout the day from writers, students, and readers in both Columbus and New York, many of whom said they planned to revisit his published work in the coming days as a way of holding onto his voice.
