Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays
A memoir in essays on disability, music, memory, the creative life, albinism, otherness, and finding your voice.
Release Date (Print): March 13, 2026
Release Date (ebook and audiobook): November 13, 2026
“A fierce manifesto about claiming your own story.”
—Tarn Wilson, author of In Praise of Inadequate Gifts
Book Description
Winner of the Wandering Aengus Press 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, 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.
Publisher:
Wandering Aengus Press
wanderingaenguspress.com
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Price: $20.00 USD
ISBN: 978-1-966644-01-9
Chrys Buckley 