illustration by Kailey Whitman
Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, composer, performer and Torah teacher. She creates multi-genre works of experimental beauty which explore the intersection of ancient wisdom texts with everyday life.
Rabins’ first collection of poetry, Divinity School, won the 2015 APR/Honickman First Book Prize; her second collection, Fruit Geode, was published in 2018 by Augury Books and was a finalist for the Jewish Book Award. As a musician and performer, Rabins is the creator and performer of Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women with accompanying curriculum, and A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, which began as a one-woman chamber-rock opera and is now an award-winning independent feature film currently on the festival circuit.
Rabins is also a coffee drinker, plant lover, DIY bar/bat/b’nai mitzvah tutor, and ritualist. She tours internationally as a violinist, singer, lecturer and performer from her home base in Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her husband and two kids. You can call her Alicia.
“plucked violin
and gorgeous
voice”
—New York Times
“investigates
the great mysteries
with a light touch”
—San Francisco Chronicle