s.e. smith: All My Dead Cats and Other Losses

Join us on July 24 at noon (PT) as we welcome special guest s.e. smith to discuss their latest book All My Dead Cats and Other Losses: Practicing Good Grief in a Culture That Fears Mourning.

Watch here. 

Despite its title, s.e. smith’s All My Dead Cats is not a book about pet loss, but a guide to understanding grief as a collective, community-driven experience. Using cat vignettes as accessible entry points to intimidating conversations, smith interviews experts—including death doulas and psychologists—to explore the stages of grief and “disenfranchised grief.” The book reframes mourning not as a fixable problem, but as an ongoing, livable shift in one’s relationship to the world. Ultimately, it teaches readers how to advocate for those experiencing trauma, process their own losses without judgment, and support fellow mourners.

s.e. smith is a Northern California-based journalist, essayist, author, and critic who explores contemporary culture and topics around labor, disability, technology, feminism, death and dying, and animal welfare. smith’s cultural criticism and reported features have appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, Time, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The Verge, Esquire, and The Nation, and were recognized with a National Magazine Award in 2020 in Columns and Commentary for the “An Unquiet Mind” column in Catapult Magazine. Their forthcoming book, All My Dead Cats and Other Losses: Practicing Good Grief in a Culture That Fears Mourning (HarperOne, 2026), explores death, dying, and conversations about loss; smith’s work also appears in numerous anthologies, most recently Disability Intimacy (Vintage, 2024). smith is a cofounder and a worker-owner of The Flytrap, a feminist journalism collective.