Name: BOOK LAUNCH: Cristalle Smith - Invisible Lives w/ Guests
Start: 2024-09-26T19:00:00-06:00
Location: 1302 4 St SW #100, Calgary, AB, Canada, Alberta T2R 0X8

$BOOK LAUNCH: Cristalle Smith - Invisible Lives w\/ Guests$

Join us Thursday, September 26th at 7PM for the launch of Invisible Lives by local author, Cristalle Smith. Cristalle is joined by authors Omar Ramadan and Dana Idriss and host Anah Jayne-Samuelson. This event is part of UCalgary Press’ B&B series.
Reserve your copy here: https://shorturl.at/vdHSX
ABOUT INVISIBLE LIVES
Invisible Lives chronicles cycles of dysfunction and domestic violence. Using experimental hybrid poetry, Cristalle Smith breaks generational silence in lyric resonance, reflecting on a childhood rife with upheaval and poverty, the invisibility of single motherhood, and the silence of domestic violence. These poems sing memory across divides of time and space, breaking the patterns of absence and denial and challenging what is kept unseen.
Associative leaps chronicle the daughter of a family always on the move. Family secrets thaw in spring mud. Invisible Lives delivers poetic meditations collaged with pop culture and impossibly colliding landscapes. The prairies of Alberta collapse into the sinkholes of northern Florida in a cacophony of lyric layering.
Smith's fierce and electric voice breaks taboos and challenges the status quo. She sings poor and working class lives, young lives, the lives of mothers, grandmothers, and daughters, the lives of veterans, lives that have endured layers of intersecting trauma and violence. Invisible Lives is an interrogation of power and intimacy that gives a new voice to the people who survive.
ABOUT CRISTALLE SMITH
Cristalle Smith is published in CV2, ARC, Room, The Maynard and elsewhere. She is the winner of the subTerrain Magazine Lush Triumphant Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction. Cristalle has a chapbook with Frog Hollow Press. Invisible Lives is her debut poetry collection in the Brave & Brilliant Series. She lives in Red Deer with her son.
ABOUT OMAR RAMADAN
Omar is a Lebanese Canadian writer, PhD Candidate in English literature and Creative Writing, and his debut poetry book with UAlberta press, This Sweet Rupture, is forthcoming in Spring 2025.
ABOUT DANIA IDRISS
Dania Idriss (she/her) is a Lebanese-Canadian author and a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. She gratefully lives and works on the traditional territory of Treaty 7, with her writing focusing on global literatures, particularly Arab speculative fiction. She enjoys all things spooky, warm sweaters, and spending time with her bunny, Arlo. Her first book, Tales of the Mountains and the Sea is set to be released in 2026 with Freehand Books.