Author Reading and Launch Party: Chrys Buckley with Domi Shoemaker

BOLD is thrilled to host a reading and launch for Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays by Chrys Buckley. Chrys will be in conversation with Domi Shoemaker.

Celebrate Chrys Buckley’s award-winning debut, a fierce and lyrical exploration of albinism, disability, visibility, and the power of story. Chrys will be in conversation with Domi Shoemaker of Corporeal Writing, sharing reflections on the writing process, featured excerpt readings, and behind-the-scenes book moments. Experience the blend of humor, music, memory, and truth-telling that defines this mixtape of essays. Featuring live acoustic music by Tracy McFarland. The main event will be followed by book signing.

Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays

Winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Nonfiction
Chrys Buckley was born with albinism, which means she has no pigment and she is legally blind. From an early age, she realized that while she was the blind one, it was hard for other people to see her as a real person.

Chrys often felt like a blank white canvas that everyone painted their assumptions about disability and paleness onto, rendering her invisible.
With warmth, compassion, wit, and lyricism, Chrys examines albinism, disability, blindness, synesthesia, dysfunctional relationships, self-betrayal, family discord, true-crime pop culture and true crimes on the smaller stage of our real lives, discrimination in medical education, and the power of words and writing.

This literary mixtape is an exploration of seeing, not seeing, being seen, and not being seen. It's a reclaiming of the real, particular self that too often gets overlooked and obscured by tropes and projections. Each essay is a love song: to place, to memory, to music across decades, to books, to science and medicine, to the land and the sea and the sky. Underscoring all the stories and contemplations is the steel will of a writer screaming in vivid color to make her flawed individual heart visible.

Chrys Buckley’s work has appeared in The Sun, Shark Reef, and Aerial. A two-time finalist in MTV’s I’m from Rolling Stone writing contest, Chrys has won the R.L. Gilette Scholarship, the Sophie Kerr Gift in English Literature, and the Friends in Art Award. Chrys lives and writes in Portland.

Domi J. Shoemaker is a queer, gender-flexing disabled writer working where body, pulse, and narrative meet. A longtime co-conspirator with Lidia Yuknavitch at Corporeal Writing, Domi cultivates spaces that elevate the voices of marginalized writers. Their work appears in [PANK], Nailed, and other literary corners where body-forward writing lives.

Arrive at 6:30 p.m. to grab a snack or drink. The event will start at 7:00 p.m.

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Event cohosted by BOLD Coffee & Books and Indigo: Editing, Design, and More.