about me.
A few basics about me: I was born in 1963 a few months before John F Kennedy was elected president, five years before the Civil Rights Act was passed, and 12 years before the passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, a legal ending of the forced assimilation and disappearance that defines the United States. 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. The majority of my people crossed the Atlantic from Italy, Germany and Ireland in the late 19th century and while there are complexities and nuances here, I identify as - and feel responsibility as - a white woman who was raised working class, is queer and is a mother.
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 what I learned and am in conversation with a publisher for a potential August 2027 publication date. plan to be walking again in 2027.
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. I just reopened a virtual form of my practice and you can find out more about this in my “work with me” page.
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 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.
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 and Anishinaabeg people. Some of my people left Native community in the early 1700s and some left four generations ago, although the tribe is not known based on the truth of residential schools and family hiding. 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.
In my German, Irish and Italian lines, my people were stonecutters and farmers. As far as I can tell, we 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 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 Cleveland, Ohio. 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: Susan Griffen, Monica Sjoo, Audre Lorde, Nigel Singer, Tony Gomez, Marge Piercy, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Mab Segrest, Suzanne Pharr, Danzy Senna, Lisa Fazio, Dorothy Allison, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, John Mohawk, Cara Page, Aurora Levins Morales, Ricardo Levins Morales, Marcie Rendon, Marie Michael, adrienne maree brown, Eli Clare, James Vukelich, Jo Kadi, Jeremy Dutcher, Joy Harjo, Mariame Kaba, Kelly Hayes, Lyla June, Carmen Vasquez, Coya Hope White Hat Artichoker, Sherri Mitchell, Robin Wall Kimmerer, James C. Scott, Thea Lee, Hugh Milne, Suzanne River and more.