Downtown Books and College of the Albemarle- Dare are proud to present An Evening with Kelley Shinn, featuring a conversation with the author, reading, audience Q & A and book signing featuring her new book The Wounds That Bind Us.
Kelley Shinn is a mother, survivor, Outer Banks resident and now author. The Wounds That Bind Us is her improbable true story. An orphan at birth, she loses her legs at the age of sixteen to a rare bacterial pathogen. She becomes an avid off-road racer and, as a single mother, attempts to drive around the globe in a Land Rover with her three-year-old daughter in tow to bring light to the plight of land mine survivors. With unflinching honesty, exceptional lyricism, and biting humor, Shinn ("that's two Ns and no shins") takes readers on a wild journey--literal and emotional--filled with striking characters and landscapes, heartbreaks, and hard-won insights, ultimately arriving at a place of profound redemption.
"Simultaneously empowering and disconcerting. . . . Ultimately, one comes away from this book with an appreciation for the beauty of broken things. We are, so many of us, like cracked pottery, repaired with gold. Our wounds may be terrible, but they are also precious."
Southern Review of Books
"The Wounds That Bind Us offers perennial relevance in a fresh literary manner. Kelley Shinn invites the reader, the voyeur, the accidental tourist into a world that is a brilliant jewel box of precise, complex, and beautiful turns, with language that bites and soothes the wound in the same stroke. These personal narratives, written with a deliberate genius of craft, usher an arresting memoir that lifts heavy veils and becomes bountiful succor for the parched truths we share."
Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate
Told with the energy and intensity of the adventure story it is, this terrifically rich and nuanced examination of a life is also a careful meditation on renewal--a remapping of the world. Guided by the narrator's keen introspection and her ability to look resolutely at harrowing sorrows and still find hope, joy, and meaning, The Wounds That Bind Us will resonate deeply, long after the last page.
Kelley Shinn lives on Ocracoke, North Carolina, a remote island twenty-six miles from the coast. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Fourth Genre, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and elsewhere.
This event will be held in Veteran's Hall at the COA-Dare campus located on the main highway in Manteo. Books will be available for purchase and signing.
