CORA’s annual SpeakUp! Luncheon brings the community together to recognize the effect of intimate partner abuse on our community and to raise voices in support of our friends and neighbors experiencing abuse.

This year’s speaker is Rachel Louise Snyder. Snyder’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The New Republic and elsewhere. Her books include her most recent work, No Visible Bruises,as well as Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade, and the novel What We’ve Lost Is Nothing. An associate professor at American University, Snyder lives in Washington, D.C.

In No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don’t know we’re seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence around key stories that explode the common myths — that if things were bad enough victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; and more insidiously, that violence inside the home is disconnected from other forms of violence. Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements, Snyder explores the real roots of private violence, its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it.