Grieving Together

Tuesday, 2/18/2025

A conversation on making art about grief and loss

Jamie-Lee Josselyn and Janice Jenkins Tosto, with Meg Gladieux

6:00 PM in person

rsvp: register here to attend in person

Join us for a conversation about writing, making art, and having more open discussions around grief and loss, particularly through writing and podcasts. The conversation will feature Janice Jenkins Tosto, an award winning author and the creator and host of Grief Journeys, a podcast where Janice interviews Philadelphians about experiences with grief and loss, which airs monthly on Germantown Community Radio, and Jamie-Lee Josselyn, Associate Director for Recruitment and an instructor for the University of Pennsylvania’s Creative Writing Program and the Director of the Summer Workshop for Young Writers at the Kelly Writers House and host of Dead Parents Society, a podcast about writing about the loss of a parent. Janice and Jamie-Lee will be in conversation with Meg Gladieux (C’23, GED ’24), 2024–25 Junior Fellow Prize winner, whose project focuses on personal essays and reported memoir about grief, loss, and mental illness.

Jamie-Lee Josselyn is Associate Director for Recruitment and an instructor in Penn’s Creative Writing Program. She is also Director of the Summer Workshop for Young Writers at the Kelly Writers House. She has been listed among Penn’s Top 30 Professors and has received the Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching and Mentoring and the School of Arts and Sciences’ Platinum Award. Her writing has been published in The New Republic, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere and she has hosted the literary podcast Dead Parents Society. Jamie-Lee has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from Bennington College.

Janice Jenkins Tostos the creator and host of “Grief Journeys,” a monthly radio program heard on Germantown Community Radio, G-town Radio, in Philadelphia, PA. Janice’s guests include grievers, grief counselors and therapists who share their personal experiences with grief and loss and talk about how people experience grief and loss in their unique ways. Guests have talked about the loss of parents, children, siblings, and pets. “Grief Journeys” is heard the last Friday of each month at 7 a.m. on gtownradio.com. You can find her on Instagram @griefjourneyshost.

Meg Gladieux is an educator and freelance writer. She currently works at Healthy NewsWorks, a non-profit which teaches journalism in Philadelphia-area schools, and as an assistant to author and journalist Stephen Fried, through which she helped work on the book Profiles in Mental Health Courage. At Penn, she co-founded The Woodlands Magazine, was a features writer and editor at 34th Street Magazine, and was part of the Body Electric poetry workshop. She is the 2024–2025 Junior Fellows Prize winner at the Kelly Writers House.