Naila Francis
Naila Francis is an Afro-Indo-Caribbean poet-writer, grief coach, death midwife and interfaith minister. She is also the founder of Salt Trails, an interdisciplinary Philadelphia collective making grief public and visible through community rituals. Her work as a coach and facilitator providing care and support for individual and collective grief, and co-hosting the grief podcast Breathing Wind, supports her vision of a more grief- and death-literate world.
Naila has brought her medicine of poetry, tender space-holding and ritual to groups and events such as The Organizing Center, Black Lotus Holistic Health Collective, the Philadelphia Movement Chaplain Network, Spirits Up! and Ursula Rucker’s Supa Sista Presents Open Movement Night. She is an ardent joy enthusiast who believes in grieving as a liberatory practice that deepens our capacity for pleasure, connection and compassion.
Awarded Grants
2023
Art and Change Grant (ACG)
Related grantees
Overview
Naila Francis and Catherine Birdsall’s project, The Five Gates of Grief, is a three-day multidisciplinary, interactive experience centered around grief awareness and support for individuals and communities with limited access and resources to grief care. This project will invite disenfranchised grievers – such as healthcare workers, nonprofit service providers, and community organizers working in gun violence prevention – into a communal experience of expressing their losses. Through visual art, sound, movement, and group interaction and ritual, this project will offer an inclusive grief space that subverts established cultural ideas around grief and loss as a private, insular experience to be moved through quickly.