Poetry​

To All the Yellow Flowers

Winner, 2020 Swarthmore Intercultural Center Arts & Activism Award
​Featured, Ms. Magazine's 2020 National Poetry Month Roundup
Honorable Mention, The New Arab's "Best Books by Arab Authors in 2020"
Special thanks to Matthew Merlino, Timothy St. Pierre, Javon Johnson, Ilyon Woo, and Will Nu’utupu Giles.
Golden Antelope Press. 2020. Content warnings: sexual violence, mental illness, family tension, mentions of alcoholism, references to suicide.
What makes someone whole? What does it mean to be unbroken? And how does this “unbreaking” process begin?
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To All the Yellow Flowers is a narrative poetry collection that tells a story of learning to rebuild, to rekindle. The story focuses on parallels: those we cannot fully draw, those we wish not to see, and those between.
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In her debut collection, Raya Tuffaha tackles questions of Palestinian-American and Muslim identity, queerness, femininity, diaspora, belonging, heritage, and the language we use to discuss it all. With focus, care, and a little bit of light, Tuffaha honors every part of her history and present, and in doing so, starts to build her own future.
“Tuffaha wonderfully spills and sprawls in such a way that her work does beautiful pirouettes across a painful diaspora while demanding us to consider if liberation is even possible outside of our mother tongues.”

 - Javon Johnson

Author of Killing Poetry: Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities
“[This book is] A reminder that perhaps we all need to be heard, to be seen, to know that it is not only okay but good to be who we are, and good to share our own stories.”

 - Gary Lawless

Owner of Gulf of Maine Books
I Saw the Sword of David
When Exotic Becomes Side Dish
Diaspora Fragile
Cantastoria Of My Kitchen Or My Place On This Earth
Three Poems, Swarthmore Review
After Javon Johnson: When the Cancer Comes

Essays & Articles

Published in agreement with an anonymous editorial criticizing the mistreatment of Black female actors, "The Diva Gap" examines how privileging white women actors over their counterparts of color discourages the arts industry from thriving.
Jaimie Lopez at Swarthmore College sits down with Raya Tuffaha to discuss Tuffaha's co-hosting of a BIPOC-Authored Night of Scenes with Thandiwe McMillan. They talk successes, failures, and hopes for the future.