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, song to call shelter, are forthcoming from Psychopomp.

Maura received her MFA in Writing from Washington University in St. Louis. Following her MFA, she received a postgraduate fellowship and taught creative writing, art writing, and literature. In 2017, she left academia to study Jewish matrilineal healing arts and Toltecan breathwork. She has spent recent years teaching ancestral repair modalities and subtle realm attunement in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She creates movement + social practice works, media, and rituals as RAFFAELLA. RAFFAELLA’s works include Smoke Psychology and Victory Highway (in collaboration with Ohlone + Coastal Miwok fire ecologies) and How to Fall (with Paiute country high desert elementals).

Maura/RAFFAELLA's practice(s) focuses on queer ecologies, bridge-building among inter-diasporic networks, architecture, wildness, earth-rage/femme-power, and eco-grief. She also writes about art and film. She has spent recent months in the holy land, engaging land-healing practices, activating ibburim to counter colonial ghosts, and writing/dreaming about collective repair. She lives in Northern California.