Department of English

Raisa Tolchinsky’s poetry explores the wisdom of the body and what it means to listen imaginatively. She is the author of Glass Jaw (Persea Books, 2024), winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and featured as one of New York Public Library’s Best New Poetry Books of 2025. Glass Jaw focuses on the world of women’s boxing in New York, where Raisa trained as a fighter. Her poetry and fiction also appears in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other publications. Her short story Rising, a re-imagining of Noah’s Ark from his wife’s perspective, was selected for the Henfield Prize for Fiction by Percival Everett in 2021. She has received residencies from Civitella Ranieri and Philips Exeter Academy.

Interested in what jazz musicians call “fear training,”, Raisa creates public poetry projects rooted in improvisation and accompaniment. She has offered typewriter poetry in settings ranging from college campuses to hospital waiting rooms. At Harvard Divinity School, Raisa examined the intersection of poetic chaplaincy and moral imagination in her thesis, Artifacts of Accompaniment, where she organized a series of typewriter sites throughout Cambridge and Boston.

Her second book of poetry, forthcoming from Persea Books in 2027, explores the architecture of grief and reimagines Ariadne’s labyrinth as a medical narrative.