Maura Pellettieri is a writer and artist. Her writing has been published in The Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, On the Seawall, Fairy Tale Review, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. Poems from her new manuscript are forthcoming from Psychopomp.

Maura received her MFA in Writing from Washington University in St. Louis. Following her MFA, she taught creative writing, English literature, and art writing at multiple universities. In 2017, she left academia to study jewish/hebrew healing arts and toltecan breathwork. She has spent recent years teaching ancestral repair modalities and ecopoetics in the San Francisco Bay Area. She creates social practice art, movement, and media works as RAFFAELLA. RAFFAELLA’s video works include Smoke Psychology and Victory Highway (in collaboration with Ohlone and Miwok fire ecologies) and How to Fall (with Paiute country high desert elementals).

Maura/RAFFAELLA's practice focuses on wildness, earth/femme-rage, alchemizing eco-grief into collective power, and building bridges among inter-diasporic networks. She also writes about art and film. She has spent much of the past year in Jerusalem, providing land healing to colonially-violated land and water bodies, listening to the human and more-than-human worlds, and writing/dreaming about collective repair. She is based in Northern California.