Black Women's
Grief Support Group

Audrey T. Williams is an award-winning author, published poet, ancestral lineage healer, and liberation literary artist who came to grief work the way many of us do: through the sudden loss of her father, and now through the slow, sacred tending and anticipatory grief related to her 89-year-old mother’s eldercare. She has navigated various forms of grief over the past 25 years, including: medical malpractice and health inequity resulting in death of her father, a forced medical “miscarriage”, divorce, ancestral/intergenerational grief, current social-cultural/political issues, and climate grief. Creative expression through the literary arts became her tool for staying present with what is still living, and it is working. That transformation is what she shares.

A Southern Black Auntie with Indo-Burmese heritage and a doctoral student in depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Audrey facilitates workshops in Somatic Depth Poetry, a chakra-based somatic method that uses poems as medicine for embodied healing. She understands grief as ancestral, layered in the land and individual’s lineage, and she trusts the writing hand to know things the thinking mind has not yet named. In her circles, grief is not a problem to solve. Perhaps it is compost, just waiting to create what comes next.

Audrey holds an MFA in creative writing and is a certified Usui Reiki Master Teacher. Her training also includes:

• Poetry as a Tool for Wellness with The Institute for Poetic Medicine
• Narrative Medicine at Columbia University
• Various trainings with The Transformative Language Arts Network

She is the founder of Ancestral Futures: Literary Arts for Liberation. Her first grief poetry chapbook, “Attending Sorrow: Poems and writing prompts for living with Grief” is forthcoming this autumn. 

She is a graduate of the 2026 Cohort of the Level 1 Dark Woods Grief Tending & Ritual  Facilitation Training.