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Poet and cultural worker born in Ponce, Puerto Rico on March 21, 1944. Pietri's family moved to New York City and settled in El Barrio when he was three years old. He attended local public schools and began writing poems while in high school. After graduation, he worked at a string of jobs until the Army drafted him to fight in the U.S. Vietnam War from 1966 to 1968. There he suffered effects of Agent Orange, the herbicide used by the American military to defoliate trees.

After Vietnam War, he aligned himself with social movements and became the Poet Laureate of the Young Lords Organization. He was a leader of the Nuyorican literary movement, which developed from activism critical of the economic and social realities of Puerto Ricans in New York City.

Pietri was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2003 and traveled to Mexico to receive an alternative treatment, but he died a year later on his return home in an airplane flying over New York City. Funeral services were held in the neighborhood where he grew up at the historic People’s Church in El Barrio.