Biography
After writing poetry privately for two decades, in 2021 Ivy Raff left a long career in technology and public policy to focus solely on writing. Since then, she’s written two poetry collections: Rooted and Reduced
to Dust and What Remains/Que Queda. Her heritage threads through her poetry. The two collections explore how a Bolshevik-influenced Jewish immigrant family in Amerika moves across time. Their granddaughter is a pro-woman, pro-Palestine writer working with complex individual and cultural histories of trauma, abuse, and healing.
“My poems work toward truth-seeking and reconciliation that must follow concentric circles of individual, familial, tribal, and global trauma. The work exposes connections. It challenges readers to begin a braver and more reverent way to live, to care about inherent worth and become free from the obsessive need to fix, control or colonize. My work is a continuation of the bridge, celebrating what textures we can touch when we reconnect.
Two dozen of her individual poems have been published in literary reviews, and several have placed in literary contests. In addition to her freelance work as a copywriter, editor, translator, and website designer, she serves on the editorial teams of Reckoning, a literary journal on environmental justice, and Seventh Wave Magazine. Ivy has backpacked through 74 countries and lived abroad in Dominica.
Ivy Raff holds an MPA in public policy from the City University of New York at Baruch College and a double Bachelors in economics and psychology from Fordham University.
Surel’s Place partnered with The Lit Room and Oldspeak for a private poetry reading from Ivy. Ivy read from her book Rooted and Reduced to Dust published in 2024 from Finish Line Press. She also read from What Remains / Que queda, a bilingual English/Spanish collection that won the Alberola International Poetry Prize with publication pending. The reading was followed by a discussion led by The Lit Room’s Cristina Houston.
Ivy led a full-day generative writing workshop during her residency. She guided participants to learn or hone the Zen approach to writing as instructed by Natalie Goldberg. With the primary objective of clearing mental clutter and writing from “the bottom of the mind,” students first learned the simple and effective concepts of Zen writing practice. She interspersed guided sitting and walking meditations with timed, prompted writings in pairs. The full group reconvened to read and listen uncritically to each other’s work.
The central focus of Ivy Raff’s residency at Surel’s Place was revisions to her third poetry collection. The titular poem and others meditate on the slower, more internal movements – like the small water that drips on a boulder for centuries before cracking it – that define our evolving relationship to family and community, to individual and cultural bodies that live and die out. Much of the “source material” for these pieces root in her own experiences balancing her feminism and pro-Palestine activism with her Eastern European Jewish heritage and identity. Still, the questions with which this work grapples are cross-cultural. How can those of us who are more of a pariah at home than in the world outside of it find belonging in the communities we forge? The answers loop through lifetimes; our personal struggles are indeed personal, but not unprecedented. What can our culture’s forgotten past feed us, when its present seems ill-fit? How can we name ourselves as part of its future?
In the gallery, the collaboration with visual artist Clementine Zenner was connected from the beginning. Ivy’s initial reaction after reviewing visual artists’ proposals was that, “Clementine’s sculptural creations are fashioned from rough natural materials coated in brilliant golds and jewel tones – it’s poetry! The kind I like to read and write.” Clementine felt the same connection, noting in her artist’s statement, “This show is the result of quiet listening—to the landscape, to each other, and to the inner worlds we carry. My visual art practice, rooted in ritual, memory, and emotional alchemy, found resonance in Ivy’s evocative language. Her poetry aligns with mine as a kind of map, for the viewer, evoking responses to the shared vision.”
This programming was supported in part by Creative West and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Gallery
