Quick Facts
Biography
Alicia Jo Rabins is a performer, musician, singer, composer, poet, writer, and Jewish scholar. She lives in Portland, Oregon, in the United States. Her use of language and words is central to her work: "Words may be the closest we get to immortality as humans. Death has no power over those words. Geography has no power over them. They transmit something beyond any one, or any community's, lifetime." She played violin for 8 years in the rock-klezmer band Golem.
Rabins and her work has been featured in The New York Times, Literary Mama, the Jewish Women's Archive, Lilith, The Forward, Tablet, Oregon Public Broadcasting, and more.
Education
She got her B.A. in English and creative writing at Barnard College, received an M.F.A. in poetry from Warren Wilson College, an M.A. in Jewish gender and women's studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and studied for two years at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem.
Performance works
- A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff (2014)
Music albums
- Girls in Trouble (2009)
- Half You Half Me (2011)
Books
- Divinity School
- Fruit Geode
Writings
- A Passover Story
Teaching
- Portland State University, Fall 2016: Arts and Jewish Experience: Exploring Diverse American Identities through Art
Family
Jo Rabins is married to bassist Aaron Hartman and has two children ages 5 and 7
Performances
- October 27, 2008: Webster Hall, New York City
- May 2014: "A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff", Portland State University
- March 6, 2018: University of North Carolina at Asheville
- November 26, 2018: The Poetry Project, New York City
Awards
- 2015 Honickman Book Prize Winner