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by Sherri D. Jones (Author)
In The Mourning After Sunday, Sherri D. Jones does what mainstream grief literature has failed to do: she centers Black experiences of loss while exposing the critical gaps in research and practice that leave entire communities without culturally competent care.
Drawing on her journey through personal grief and professional training as an MSW candidate and grief educator, Sherri weaves memoir with academic critique. Her voice moves between intimate reflection on loss and unflinching analysis of how the field of thanatology has rendered Black grief invisible. The result is a book that serves three essential purposes:
For clinicians and researchers: A necessary examination of whose grief has been studied, whose mourning has been theorized, and what it means when entire communities are absent from the frameworks you've been taught. This is your call to professional accountability.
For Black mourners and community members: Validation that your grief is real, your cultural expressions are meaningful, and the absence you've felt in grief literature reflects the field's failures, not your experience. Your story belongs here.
For faith communities: Insight into how grief moves through congregations and why the gap between Sunday's expectations and real mourning needs tending. Faith leaders carry the weight of their communities' losses, and this book offers understanding for that sacred work.
From the pews where Sunday's best meets unresolved sorrow, to the clinical spaces where providers lack training in culturally responsive grief care, The Mourning After Sunday illuminates what's been missing and what must change. It's a personal testimony and a professional manifesto. It's scholarship grounded in lived experience. It's the book that holds space for mourning while demanding systems do better.
This is the work of building bridges between experience and expertise, between community knowledge and clinical practice, between what's been missing and what comes next.
