The Writer’s Center welcomes writer Diane Zinna for a reading from her new book, Letting Grief Speak: Writing Portals for Life After Loss.

FREE & open to the public. RSVP below.

There will be a limited number of copies of Letting Grief Speak available for purchase at the Writer’s Center. If you would like a signed copy, we hope you’ll consider purchasing it before the event and bringing it with you. Purchase the book here>>>

Diane Zinna is the author of Letting Grief Speak: Writing Portals for Life After Loss, a craft book on the art of telling our hardest stories, to be published July 21 from Columbia University Press. Her novel, The All-Night Sun (Random House, 2020), was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and Cabell First Novelist Award. Her short works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and honored in Best American Essays 2025. For the past 6 years, she has led the free online class Grief Writing Sundays. Meet her there or online at dianezinna.com.

About Letting Grief Speak: Writing Portals for Life After Loss

Society doesn’t always make it easy to tell stories about loss. Grief can make us feel that we have crossed over to another side, where people can’t reach us and we can’t reach others. We’re encouraged to move quickly through the often-misunderstood “stages of grief”; we fear that we are burdening others with our pain. But pain can feel more manageable when we find ways to describe it—and writing about grief can help us connect with others who have felt pain of their own.

Letting Grief Speak is a creative writing craft book on the art of telling our hardest stories. Based on a class called Grief Writing Sundays that Diane Zinna has led for several years, it provides ninety writing prompts with accompanying craft techniques to help people find language for their grief. By turns gentle, unexpected, rebellious, and wonderfully strange, these prompts open portals: entryways into spaces where difficult emotions can become meaningful narratives. Warm, sensitive, and honest, Letting Grief Speak is a memoir of the craft, interwoven with stories from the author’s own life. It also includes pieces from acclaimed writers and more than forty of her Grief Writing students, inviting readers to find their own ways to tell vulnerable stories. A tool for writers and a companion for grievers, this book meets writers of all levels where they are, no matter what kind of grief they hold.

If you need an accommodation for this event, please contact us at access@writer.org. We will attempt to fulfill all requests, but advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility services.

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