The Talking Stick

Raine Geoghegan, MA, is of mixed heritage, English, Romani (Romanichal), Welsh and Irish. She is a performance poet, prose writer, playwright, voice over artist and performance skills coach. Prior to writing she was a professional actor, dancer and theater practitioner. She trained in dance, theater and drama therapy. She founded Earthworks, a Women's Theatre Collective in 1993. Illness and disability brought her to writing. Her poems and prose have appeared in journals, magazines and online. Raine's work can also be found on YouTube and Sound Cloud. Her work has also been widely anthologized. Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize; Forward Prize and Best of the Net, she won the Moon Prize for Writing in a Woman's Voice and her poem "The Birth of Rage" was Highly Commended in the Winchester Poetry Competition for the 'Reaching Out' category. Her three pamphlets, Apple Water: Povel Panni, they lit fires: lenti hatch o yog and The Stone Sleep are published with Hedgehog Poetry Press. Apple Water: Povel Panni was chosen as a Poetry Book Society 2019 Selected Pamphlet. She is the Romani Script Consultant for the musical For Tonight which will be performed in the UK and the USA in the near future. She is featured as the 12th Profile for the Romani Cultural and Arts Company and was Headline Poet for the World Storytelling Café in 2021. Her video was viewed over 2500 times. Her play The Tree Woman was performed online for the worldwide Earthquake Festival in October 2020 with the San Francisco Theatre Collective. She was a Guest Poet at Over the Edge Poetry event in Galway in 2020 and has performed at many other poetry events in Ireland and the UK. In February 2022 she participated in A Suitcase of Poetry, an Irish project founded by Fiona Bolger and Viviana Florentino and culminating in a video on YouTube. In 2024, Raine will edit an anthology of Romani women writers and artists, to be published by Salmon Poetry.