Ravenna Raven works as a Listener Poet at hospitals, healing centers, and national healthcare conferences, and leads The Good Listening Project’s Certified Listener Poet course.
Ravenna’s early childhood experiences with first responders, surgeons, and hospice nurses propelled her toward writing as a practice for healing and making meaningful connections with others.
She earned a B.A. in literature and creative writing from the George Washington University and an MFA in poetry from University of Maryland. She teaches creative writing, reading development, and restorative yoga to students of all ages.
When I was a child, I had several experiences that introduced me to first responders, surgeons, and hospice nurses. As it became clearer that these experiences would turn me into a poet rather than a medical professional, I began looking for ways to reconnect with medicine and healing through writing poetry.
She was very proud of her daughter and has hopes for “a bright future that’s as pain free as possible”
“Our constituents are uniquely affected by the pandemic,” they said. This poemee was an educational psychologist who spoke about how much they missed working in person with med students, healthcare staff, and medical educators.
These members of the Wellness team in the Department of Neurology at the University of Colorado each spoke about the importance of community and connection.
“I’ve always loved hearts,” she said. She was a cardiac nurse who had been drawn to a job in the catheterization laboratory. “It’s so rare to have an opportunity to immediately do something good for somebody, but it happens often in the cath lab,” she told me.
She began her career as a hospice volunteer and then worked as a critical care provider in the Emergency Department for many years. She told me she always wanted her patients to feel empowered while in her care. “This feeling has to do with quality of life,” she said.
She talked about how hopeful med students feel when they first start out, and told me she worried that it would get harder for doctors to hold onto hope and empathy the further along they were in their careers.
He asked for a poem for his dad — “something beautiful and transitory like blossoms or snowflakes,” he said. He talked about what it’s like to see people change over time, through the seasons.
"I struggled to make friends until my junior year of high school," she said. "Then I finally opened up and became friends with so many people." She was now a freshman at Georgetown University and was learning how to bond with her new peers.
We talked when she had a quick break during her shift at the Infusion Center. She told me how important it was for her to make the most of the moments she had to make connections with people.
She told me that she had lived in Florida for 50 years but now that she had an empty nest, she’d become a traveling nurse so she could live in different places. “I was only supposed to be in D.C. for three months,” she said, “but now I’ve been here for nine because I just love it so much.”
