Biography
Merissa Nathan Gerson is the author of Forget Prayers, Bring Cake: A Single Woman’s Guide to Grieving (Mandala Publishing / Simon & Schuster, August 2021). She holds a BA in American Culture Studies and Women and Gender Studies from Washington University in St. Louis, an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, and an MA in Jewish Studies from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California where she focused on sex and gender and in conjunction with UC Berkeley, on inherited trauma.
Her work focuses on intercultural grief and grieving, inherited trauma, anti-racism, and sex and intimacy and how it relates to religion, disability, and identity. Multicultural medical systems, spiritual medicine, and narrative medicine are central. She was the intergenerational trauma consultant to Amazon's hit show Transparent and has writing featured in The New York Times, Playboy Magazine, The Atlantic, Elle.com, Tablet Magazine, Lilith Magazine, and beyond. After releasing a 2018 ELI Talk on consent and Talmud, she founded www.KenMeansYes.org to address the need for consent education in Jewish spaces. www.merissanathangerson.com/about