In-Person: Renegade Grief by Carla Fernandez

Join us on Thursday, March 27th at 7pm for an event with Carla Fernandez, co-founder of The Dinner Party, for an event celebrating the release of her book, Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss. For this event, Carla will be joined in conversation by Becca Bernstein.

Please note: This event is free to attend, but registration is required!

From grief quests to altar-making, to dinner parties to Dungeons & Dragons, Renegade Grief is a profound and vulnerable exploration of care practices and rituals that empower grievers in a culture that expects us to simply “give it time.”
So, you’ve lost someone. At first, there is an outpour of support and phone calls and care packages. But after the services are done and the phone stops ringing, there is a quiet in the air and an expectation to get on with your life as previously planned. The problem is that death has a way of making all plans go out the window. Renegade Grief offers the support in this next stage of grieving—when you feel isolated in your loss and are figuring out how to navigate it.

Shaped by her own experience with the death of her father and her time cofounding The Dinner Party, a leading peer-support organization for people who’ve experienced a major loss, Carla Fernandez pushes back on the death-denying culture we live in. For too long, grief has been treated as something pitiable, simply sad, to be gotten over as soon as possible. But after fifteen years of being in a community with fellow grievers, Carla has witnessed a different side of the story. Grieving a significant loss is hardcore, hardly something to be swept under the rug, but an experience to be held with respect, a creative spirit, and with friends. Through inspiring stories of real grievers, patterns from across history, and fresh science, Renegade Grief enlivens you with the permission and possibility to explore your grief in your own unique way and reminds you that you’re not alone in doing it.

Renegade Grief is an indispensable resource for people at any stage of the grieving process and with Carla’s candid and compassionate guidance, you learn that life after loss isn’t about the futile attempt of arriving at some other side. Rather, it’s about building your community, adjusting to change, and finding the way for your grief to become a pathway into your own version of a soulful life.

Carla Fernandez’s work focuses on how circles come together to foster collective care and change culture when a new status quo is called for. She is the cofounder of The Dinner Party, a national network of peer-support circles for young adult grievers, featured in The New York Times, NPR, Oprah Daily, and cited in multiple books. In addition to her work in grief, Carla partners with a range of clients through her community design studio as an impact strategist and facilitator, particularly on initiatives related to climate change, democracy, and the arts. Carla is a senior fellow with USC’s Annenberg School Innovation Lab and a Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Scholar in Social Entrepreneurship at NYU. She divides her time between the Hudson Valley and Joshua Tree.

Becca Bernstein has dedicated their career to transforming the ways that we build community and find belonging, particularly across experiences of loss & hardship. For the last 10+ years, they have developed and led at-scale programs and communities that help us be more honest+real and make the world more human. Becca currently serves as the Chief Community & Operations Officer of Belong Center, a nationwide nonprofit to fight the loneliness epidemic and empower social connection. Previously, Becca served as the Head of Option B at Sheryl Sandberg’s Foundation, reaching over 24M people with support for those navigating grief, as well as the Community Director of The Dinner Party, an organization that connects grievers in their 20s, 30s, and 40s to circles of peer community and care. Becca is also a seasoned public speaker, speaking alongside everyone from author and thought leader, Cheryl Strayed, to humanitarian and social justice activist Sonya Renee Taylor, to Congresswoman, Ayanna Pressley. They are thrilled to join the incredible author and their dear friend, Carla Fernandez, for this special reading!

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are strongly encouraged. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. We have dimmable, non-fluorescent lights. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email [email protected].

Host or Publisher Women & Children First