about me.
A few basics about me: I was born in 1963 a few months before John F Kennedy was elected president, at the start of the Portuguese Colonial Wars when those nations in Africa colonized by Portugal were fighting for their sovereignty, four years before the Six Days War, among a range of other colonial resistance wars, five years before the Civil Rights Act was passed, and 12 years before the passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and then in rural Ohio, lived for some years in a three-generation household with my mother and brother, grandparents and great grandparents and now live in Minneapolis, MN.
I love the Midwest, like fiercely loyally love the Midwest and particularly this land of the Great Lakes Basin and have mostly always lived here minus seven years in Bristol, England and small periods in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I spent a lot of time hitchhiking and traveling in my 20s, meaning I stayed for three or four months in a lot of different places, but I have been happily settled on these Dakota lands for over 35 years.
In January 2025, I completed a walk from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast of Turtle Island. I had been dreaming of this walk since I was 16 and started the walk in my 60th year. If you are curious about what this means, you can read more here or download the book where I’ve written a lot of words about it. Similarly, I posted a number of pieces on the blog on this site as well as through Instagram and Facebook. I am currently writing a book about the walk and it will be published in Fall 2027 by North Atlantic Books.
I work as a body-based practitioner (a craniosacral therapist (and don’t trust the Wikipedia page about this modality) who is trained in scores of other body-based teachings), a cultural worker and writer. I also am part of two different organizations that I helped form: Healing Histories Project and Relationships Evolving Possibilities. My practice is currently full with a waiting list and so I have closed new enquiries.
In the “culture work” category, I do a range of types of work that find me through relationship and history. I call it “culture work” because most of the time that is what it looks like: being in supportive conversations focused on aligning what we believe and value with the day-to-day activities of survival. I have years of work in nonprofits including three years sharing leadership of a community foundation. I have cofounded and run a local newspaper and been an editor for a queer community arts journal. I have a shit ton of experience in that thing called fundraising, but which is just about supporting communities so that our material conditions are met within a violently unequal economic system. And finally, I have years of supporting and navigating interpersonal and organizational conflict, mentoring/coaching (whatever the word is for when you are invited to spend intimate time with someone who wants to learn from you) different shapes of people, and teaching/facilitating content on our individual and collective relationship to our bodies, the land-which-is-our-bodies, and the histories that shape us.
My books are: Queerly Classed, which was first published in 1996 and is now open source on my website, Restricted Access: On Lesbians in Disability which I published in 1997 with Victoria Brownworth and is now out of print, Liberated to the Bone, which was published in 2022 as part of the Emergent Strategy Series at AK Press, and At the Fork on the Road, self-released in 2024, which I wrote about the walk before I actually took the walk. I recently signed on with an agent so am working on a range of potential future books. This makes me happy.
I regularly write pieces on this website under “blogs” and also share writing through Patreon. If you are interested, you can join my Patreon starting at $5 a month. This is where I share notes, pieces from the upcoming book and chunks of essays that are in process - and a lot of gratitude.
I also want to say one more thing. As a writer, I am selfishly putting my words out into the world without, usually, time for the scope of conversation that is sometimes asked for. And as the above paragraph shows, I am asking for support for that writing, hoping that the writing can be the offering, as opposed to other shapes of my time. I am noticing that as I get older, my focus is on deepening into the most local of relationships that shape my life, as well as the web of people who live in multiple lands and who I have known for twenty, thirty, and sometimes over forty years. Writing combined with the false ease of reaching out to each other through all of the internet-woven spaces means that I sometimes feel like I am fake offering intimacy to people I have never met. Thank you to those who reach out in response to something I have written. Thank you for the time you have taken and the care you bring to your words. I will do what I can to respond and, as time goes one, I am going to always privilege the relationships that I am already in which means that there is a chance you won’t hear from me. But please know that I heard your words.
Deeper biography: I am learning everyday from the people and the land around me how to better introduce myself to you. For that reason, I am also including a relationship bio here.
My name is Susan Raffo and I am the daughter of Peter Louis Raffo and Kathleen Ann Young. I am the sister of Peter Junior (deceased), Patricia (deceased) and Jeffrey. I am the granddaughter of Eugene Lous Raffo and Louise Carmella Grappone and of Frederick Charles Young and Winifred Mary Sieferd. My paternal line has been on Turtle Island for three generations, settling first in New York, after leaving Gesualdo, Campania and Chiavari, Luguria in Italy. My maternal maternal line has been on Turtle Island for three generations, settling in and around Cleveland, Ohio after leaving the provinces of Hesse, Bavaria and Mecklenberg in what was then Prussia. My maternal paternal maternal line has been on Turtle Island for four generations, having arrived in Massachusetts from Kilgeever, County Mayo, and my maternal paternal paternal line has been on Turtle Island for many generations, being a mix of early French settlers, Penobscot/Wabanaki and Anishinaabeg people. Some of my people left Native community in the early 1700s and some left four generations ago. I share these details out of a commitment to not let the genocide win but also out of the clarity that nothing I am writing here is about identity but about the waves of relationship that made my life possible.
As far as I can tell, my European ancestors have always been Catholic and so I feel responsibility to the history of Catholic violence while also honor that this was the faith that many generations of my people used to make sense of their lives. As a child, my German great grandmother told me stories of being bullied for being Catholic in the 1920s and my Italian great uncle told me stories of quotas and a resistance to assimilation. I also grew up knowing that some of my German-American great uncles worked hard in Cleveland to keep Black members out of the Pipefitter’s Union. I am the third generation of political activists, starting with my grandparents from both lines working in labor unions, fighting for the rights of elders, and rooted in Italian anarchist traditions. My mother was a Freedom Rider and in my childhood, people resisting the draft and escaping the Vietnam War en route to Canada stayed in our basement in Chicago. I was raised in a multiracial family, predominantly working class but using all of the privileges brought to white families in the 1960s and 70s to begin climbing up the class ladder.
I am the partner of Raquel Volaco Simoes, a Brazilian immigrant, and we are the parents of Luca Maria Raffo-Simoes as well as something we don’t have English words for but in Portuguese would be the tias of many other children. We live in a dyke collective with four other adults where we plan to support each other as we age.
I have been taught by so many people over my six plus decades that I know that I will miss most of their names but I will list a few here. Most are personally known to me and a few are known through their writing and care. Many have now passed: Monica Sjoo, Audre Lorde, Nigel Singer, Tony Gomez, Marge Piercy, Amber Hollibaugh, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Mab Segrest, Suzanne Pharr, Susan Griffin, Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Resmaa Menakem, Monica Sjoo, Danzy Senna, Lisa Fazio, Larry Heller, Dorothy Allison, bell hooks, Daniel Foor, Ana Polanco, Cara Carlson, Beth Zemsky, Signe Harriday, Jason Sole, Rox Anderson, Josina Manu, Eleanor Savage, Gloria Anzaldua, John Mohawk, Cara Page, Aurora Levins Morales, Ricardo Levins Morales, Marcie Rendon, Marie Michael, adrienne maree brown, Eli Clare, James Vukelich, Norma Wong, Jo Kadi, Kai Cheng Thom, Irene Ammar, Shannon Willis, Octavia Butler, Elder Albert Marshall, Jeremy Dutcher, Suzie Gruber, Eli Claire, Joy Harjo, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Lex Horan, Mariame Kaba, Kelly Hayes, Lyla June, Thea Lee, Tommy Lee Woon, Carmen Vasquez, Coya Hope White Hat Artichoker, Sherri Mitchell, Alan Berube, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Sharon Day, James C. Scott, David Gruber, Thea Lee, Hugh Milne, Suzanne River and more.