Reading: WATER EYE

The central focus of Ivy Raff’s residency at Surel’s Place has been 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?

BIOGRAPHY 

After writing poetry privately for two decades, in 2021 Ivy Raff (Queens, New York) 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, a bilingual English/Spanish translation which won 2nd place in the Dolors Alberola International Poetry Prize. 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.

Her individual poems and translations have been published in such noted literary spaces as Ninth Letter, International Poetry Review, Electric Literature, Atlanta Review, and Aesthetica Creative Writing Award Annual, among numerous others. Ivy serves creative communities as the Senior Systems Project Manager at MacDowell, the United States’ first artist residency, and as a member of the editorial staff at Seventh Wave Magazine.

Ivy 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.  She lives in Morelos, Mexico with her partner, the novelist and human rights attorney Jorge Ríos.

This programming is supported in part by Creative West and the National Endowment for the Arts.