READING
POETRY AND PINTS
Tuesday, June 10th | 6:30pm

at Oldspeak: 3640 W Chinden Blvd in Garden City

21+

Special Event: Poetry and Pints

Surel's Place is partnering with The Lit Room and gaining special access to Oldspeak on Tuesday, June 10th at 6:30pm for a private poetry reading from our next artist-in-residence Ivy Raff. Cozy up with a pint of Alliteration Beer (or other NA offerings) and absorb Ivy's readings from both published and unpublished work in English and Spanish.

Ivy will be reading from her book Rooted and Reduced to Dust published just last year from Finish Line Press. The book is included in some of the donation levels and Ivy will be available to sign them at the reading. She will also read from What Remains / Que queda, a bilingual English/Spanish collection that won the Alberola International Poetry Prize with publication pending. The reading will be followed by a discussion led by The Lit Room's Cristina Houston.

"Heaven and earth conspire that everything which has been, be rooted and reduced to dust."
-Isaac Bashevis Singer

So begins Ivy Raff‘s debut poetry chapbook, which plumbs the depths of movement, of growth: from one generation to the next, from Eastern Europe across America, from sickness to health.  With braided fearlessness and vulnerability, Raff bridges the past with the heartbreaking tenderness of today.

"Observant, challenging, sensuous, glowing with an undercarriage of mystique, Raff’s poems are torsos that twist to embrace the universe.  Every muscled line is taut, knowing its desire and how to hold what it loves in its arms."
–Jimmy Santiago Baca, American Book Award-winning author of Martin and Meditations on the South Valley

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.

Other events during Ivy's residency at Surel's Place:

June 6th: First Friday Art & Studio Stroll

June 14th: Workshop-Writing from the Bottom of the Mind

June 24th: Reading- new work Water Eye