Author Eileen Elizabeth presents her new book in conversation with Reza Aslan.

Join us for a conversation with Eileen Elizabeth, author of Carrying the Bones: Rituals for a Dying World, and acclaimed author and scholar Reza Aslan!

Blending memoir, cultural criticism, environmental writing, and spiritual inquiry, the book explores how ritual and creative practice can help us navigate grief, ecological change, and the search for meaning in an uncertain world. Eileen and Reza will discuss grief, transformation, the sacred dimensions of the natural world, and the role storytelling can play in helping us care for one another and the places we inhabit.

The conversation will be followed by an audience Q&A and book signing.

About the participants:

Eileen Elizabeth is a poet and essayist. She cofounded Boshemia magazine and has written for a variety of publications, including Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland, Bellevue Literary Review, Appalachian Review, and Pangyrus.

Reza Aslan is an internationally acclaimed writer, producer, and scholar of religions. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Zealot, and editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

About the book:

Carrying the Bones braids memoir, cultural criticism, and poetics to ask how we might mourn meaningfully in an era of environmental crisis and pandemic loss. Moving between the personal and the planetary, the book traverses landscapes from Appalachian forests and West Coast cemeteries to Arctic tundra and Sámi song traditions, drawing on ancient Greek lyric, Indigenous cosmologies, and contemporary ecological thought. Each of the four sections serves as a ritual space: an act of carrying the dead, tending their memories, and imagining futures beyond despair. Through fieldwork, historical research, and intimate narrative from a queer perspective, author Eileen Elizabeth explores how grief can be more than private sorrow—it can become an artistic, communal, and ecological practice.

By providing narrative and ritual prompts at a moment when traditional funerary customs have been disrupted and many people lack scripts for grief, Carrying the Bones empowers individuals—especially those who identify as secular or spiritually unaffiliated—to craft new rites of remembrance. It offers a luminous contribution to ongoing conversations about how art, language, and ritual can help us face mortality and care for a dying world.