Welcome to the fourth meditation of our Grief, Collected series, which come out every Friday.

Today is a literary meditation with the esteemed author Alexander Chee. Alexander is the bestselling author of Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and a beautiful essayist making meaning of the world around us and helping us imagine new ones. In today’s episode he is reading his 2018 essay, “Why Grieve Is The Word Of The Year,” which walks us through all of our many griefs, and how we can find ourselves in them.

More about Alexander Chee and his work here and find him on Twitter at @alexanderchee and on Instagram at @cheemobile.

You can find more info and resources at GriefCollected.com

More about Alexander Chee - 

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. A contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewaneee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays.

He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig House, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak.

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