Marisa Renee Lee — Waiting for Dawn
Grief advocate and author Marisa Renee Lee explores loss as a public and political experience — how Black women in particular navigate grief without cultural permission.
Why we picked this
Lee makes an argument that grief is political — that who is allowed to mourn publicly, and how, is shaped by race and gender in ways American culture rarely examines directly. Glory Edim is a skilled moderator for this conversation.
Marisa Renee Lee is the author of Grief Is Love, a book that reframed grief not as a problem to be solved but as the enduring presence of love after loss. Waiting for Dawn extends that work, focusing specifically on how Black women experience and are permitted to express grief — in public, in workplaces, and in a culture that has historically demanded their emotional labor without offering reciprocal care.
Lee has become one of the most articulate public voices on grief as a lived experience with structural dimensions. She argues that the way people are allowed to mourn — or not — is shaped by race, gender, and social position in ways that are rarely made explicit. The book addresses this directly, and in doing so opens a conversation about emotional labor, community, and who gets to be seen as vulnerable.
The event at Union Market is moderated by Glory Edim, founder of Well-Read Black Girl and a sharp interlocutor for exactly this kind of conversation. This is an evening that should resonate well beyond its immediate subject.