Author and organizer Cindy Milstein presents Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief. This event will create space for participants to reflect on and share their own stories of structural loss, grief, and resistance. We hope that it will offer a much-needed opening for all the feelings that many of us are experiencing, and how they relate to the organizing many of us are doing.

We can bear almost anything when it is worked through collectively. Grief is generally thought of as something personal and insular, but when we publicly share loss and pain, we lessen the power of the forces that debilitate us, while at the same time building the humane social practices that alleviate suffering and improve quality of life for everyone. Addressing tragedies from Fukushima to Palestine, incarceration to eviction, AIDS crises to border crossings, and racism to rape, the intimate yet tenacious writing in this volume shows that mourning can pry open spaces of contestation and reconstruction, empathy and solidarity.

Rebellious Mourning includes contributions from Claudia Rankine, Sarah Schulman, David Wojnarowicz, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, David Gilbert, and thirty-two others. The book also includes a 32-page color insert featuring artists like Jet Chalk, Oree Originol, Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza, and more.

Cindy Milstein is the author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations, co-author of Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism, and editor of the anthology Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism.