Charis welcomes Kimberly Dark in conversation with Cooper Lee Bombardier for a celebration of Damaged Like Me: Essays on Love, Harm, and Transformation.

People who have been damaged, thrown away, marginalized, or traumatized are more capable of apprehending social patterns, precisely because they've needed to be aware and vigilant about how the world works. For too long, those who rely on long-held rights and entitlement have claimed that others are biased about the very topics on which they have expertise. Damaged Like Me is a series of essays and stories that reveal a complex social landscape. It shows how possible and vital it is to build roads to a more equitable and loving collective culture that includes body sovereignty, racial justice, gender equity/liberation, and much more. It does so by relying on the insights and approaches to knowledge production of those on the receiving end of inequity and violence, those whose "objectivity" on issues of oppression has been consistently maligned despite their having the most to teach us.

Kimberly Dark is a writer, professor, storyteller, and sociologist, working to reveal the hidden architecture of everyday life so that we can reclaim our power as social creators. She is also the author of Fat, Pretty, and Soon to be Old; The Daddies; and Love and Errors; and her essays, stories, and poetry are widely published in academic and popular online publications.

Cooper Lee Bombardier is an American writer and visual artist living in Canada. He is the author of the memoir-in-essays Pass With Care. His writing appears in The Kenyon Review, The Malahat Review, Ninth Letter, CutBank, Nailed Magazine, Longreads, BOMB, and The Rumpus; and in 15 anthologies, including the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology, The Remedy–Essays on Queer Health Issues, and the Lambda-nominated anthology, Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Speculative Fiction From Transgender Writers, which won a 2018 American Library Association Stonewall Book Award. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at University of King’s College and in women and gender studies at Saint Mary’s University.

This event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income right now, but we encourage and appreciate a solidarity donation in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Charis Circle's mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/CharisCircle?code=chariscirclepage

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Damaged Like Me: Essays on Love, Harm, and Transformation--Kimberly Dark in conversation with Cooper Lee Bombardier