Renegade Grief Roadshow: Los Angeles

Join us for an event to bring together the The Dinner Party community and its allies in Los Angeles to celebrate the release of Renegade Grief: A Guide to The Wild Ride of Life After Loss by Carla Fernandez.

Joining Carla in conversation with Arianne Edmonds, founder of creative agency ACE Consulting Agency & J.L. Edmonds Project. Followed by a workshop led by Janelle Ketcher from Postal Service for the Dead. This event will have a brief reading, a lively discussion on the importance of community care in times of loss, and letter writing workshop, and a chance to connect with fellow grievers in Los Angeles. Join us in bringing together The Dinner Party community and its allies, past, present and future.

This event will be located at a private residence in Silverlake. The address will be included in your ticket confirmation.

Can’t make the event? Purchase a copy of Renegade Grief .

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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.”

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.

Learn more about Renegade Grief.

Have questions? Please email [email protected]

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.

Arianne Edmonds is a 5th generation Angeleno civic leader and founder of creative agency ACE Consulting Agency & J.L. Edmonds Project, an initiative dedicated to preserving the history and culture of the Black American West. She has curated and presented her research about Black history, memory and legacy at several cultural institutions around the U.S. Her family archives stretch back to the 1850's and her story as the keeper of her ancestral records can be found in the New York Times 1619 Project, The Root and LA Weekly. Edmonds holds a B.S in Communications from University of the Arts. She a former Commissioner of the Los Angeles Public Library. Now currently a Senior Civic Media fellow at USC Annenberg and author of forthcoming book, We Now Belong to Ourselves, published by Oxford University Press.

Postal Service for the Dead (PSD) is an ongoing, collective project where people send letters to anyone in their life who has died. Founded in 2022, PSD has received over 200 cards, letters, and postcards celebrating the unique and shared ways we relate to grief. PSD's goal is to normalize the full range of emotions and experiences that go alongside death, dying, and grieving.

Janelle Ketcher is an artist, library science professional, and Founder of Postal Service for the Dead. Originally from Iowa, she currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Janelle holds a BFA in Painting, Art History and Social Practice from The Kansas City Art Institute; received the Certification in Social Emotional Arts from Arts & Healing Initiative, completed the End of Life Training Program at Going with Grace, and is pursuing a MS in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her focus is to encourage creative expression throughout our entire lifespan-from youth programming to end of life projects through the intersections of resource access, archiving, and public service.

Host or Publisher Carla Fernandez