Raf has lived several lives: queer woman, trans man, professor, provocateur, sober buddy, detransitioned lesbian, novelist, journalist, ex-academic, mindfulness radical.

Raf’s background includes three critically acclaimed books from Big Five presses, a tenured professorship in a well-ranked MFA program, a degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a bachelor’s in philosophy from Carleton College. After the pandemic, she saw academic and political institutions destabilized and decided to take her own plunge into uncharted territory. She quit her tenured job and embarked on a new kind of writing career, one that combined fiction with screenwriting, cultural criticism, and viral essays on feminism, film and TV. She opened a virtual classroom and welcomed students from all walks of life. She watched her platform grow.

Now, she’s available to speak to book clubs, podcasters, arts nonprofits, and college groups about what it means to build a creative career in an era where past orthodoxies are falling out of favor and the reading public is hungry for new ideas.