ABOUT THE FOUNDER

Meet Michelle Carrera: Your Companion in Grief and Liberation

Grief is not what broke me. It’s what made me fluent.

Michelle Carrera is a writer and grief worker rooted in Borikén. Their work moves at the edges of death, memory, ecology, and transformation, listening to what is often avoided: loss, extinction, collapse, and the quiet work of becoming.

Through essays, speculative fiction, obituaries-as-ritual, and field guides, Michelle approaches grief not as pathology, but as intelligence. A force that reveals what we love, what we’ve lost, and what still asks to be tended.

Grief and Liberation emerged as a living ecosystem for this work, holding stories, practices, and published forms that allow grief to be composted into meaning rather than rushed toward resolution.

Michelle’s practice is shaped by personal and collective loss, queer survival, caregiving, ecological grief, and a return home to Borikén. Their work is informed by death doula training, grief education, interfaith animal chaplaincy, and years of holding space across communities but their deepest learning comes from lived experience, collapse, and attention.

She do not offer solutions. They offer presence, story, and a place to stay with what hurts.

At times, the work opens into grief companioning, workshops, collaborations, and ritual spaces. Writing remains the primary portal.

Credentials & Lineage

Certified in:

  • Death Doula Training, Doorway Into Light (with Bodhi Be + Ram Dass)

  • Certified Grief Educator, mentored by David Kessler

  • Interfaith Animal Chaplain, ordained through Compassion Consortium

Roles She Holds within Grief Work

  • Grief Facilitator, Imagine: A Center for Grief & Loss

  • LGBTQ+ Youth Mentor, Rainbow Café Sussex

  • Writer-in-Residence, Grief and Liberation / The Underground Dispatch

For more on my other previous and current projects, visit www.michellecarrera.com

Reach Out

VISION OF LIBERATION

Liberation, here, is not singular. It is spiritual, political, ecological, and relational, woven like root and mycelium, breath and branch.

Spiritually, liberation is remembering how to listen: to bodies, land, ancestors, and the more-than-human world. It is grief as compass and tenderness as practice.

Politically, it is the daily work of refusing abandonment through mutual aid, decolonization, repair, and collective care that does not turn away when things get hard.

Ecologically, it is falling back into relationship with the living world: honoring extinction as grief, defending what remains, and tending what can still grow.

This is not metaphor. This is practice.

Grief, death, love, and freedom are not separate here. They are thresholds and this work exists to walk them with care.