Maura Pellettieri is a poet, prose writer, artist, editor, and culture-maker. She received her BA in English from SUNY Buffalo and her MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis. She is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Crystal and Flame, an experimental art writing journal and social forum that bridges gaps in the cultural community and instigates the reestablishment of the fine arts as a sacred space.
She has taught and given talks at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Washington University in St. Louis, the Contemporary Art Museum-Saint Louis, and elsewhere. She has collaborated with visual artists, composers, and other writers, throughout North America and internationally, contributing to numerous social practice projects, performance works, and musical scores. They have taught creative writing, literature, and art writing at Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Hartford, and the University of Missouri-Saint Louis, and continue to teach in a variety of community contexts.
Maura Rafael understands all space as sacred space, including many spaces named secular, and is particularly called to priestess in these contexts, where sacred space-holding is often deeply needed yet must be delivered with nuance and care for cultural difference and difference of belief. They weave site-specific meditation and ritual in art galleries, public parks and gardens, and other sites of the commons. They’re teaching practice includes offering unique meditations, earth-based embodiment practices, creative writing, and ritual craft to children, teenagers, and multigenerational groups. They support artists and healers as a creative coach and editor, editing book manuscripts and other projects, guiding clients to unblock their creative processes, and consulting in a variety of fine arts contexts.
Their current writing focuses on ecopoetics, gender, architecture, and power. They utilize ritual, place-based ekphrasis, and deep listening practices to write about the human relationship to Earth. As a writer and artist, they engage conceptual and ritual-based research around how we express, discharge, and experience the grief of Anthropocene extinctions. In her current practice, she performs land and elemental transmissions to invite participants into a deeper experience of connectivity and conversation with earth.