Author Event with Schyler Butler

6:30pm Thursday, November 12
at Prologue Bookshop

Blending dream dialogue, personal reflection, and historical imaginings, poet Schyler Butler explores how intimacy and love take shape under the white gaze.

This stunning debut asks what remains of intimacy when the quiet terror of white supremacy shapes every touch, silence, and room. Through a fiercely confessional voice, Phantom Hue traces the inner life of a light-skinned Black woman reckoning with the inheritances of race, gender, history, and family. From colorism to the uneasy desire of interracial love, each poem strips away performance to expose raw truth. Rooted in the personal yet bound to the political, Butler’s lyricism and intellect pulse through a collection that grieves and praises, confesses and conjures—a luminous reckoning with what it means to live, and love, inside a haunted body.

Schyler Butler was born in Columbus, Ohio but raised in Central Texas. A graduate of The Ohio State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, she has received support from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Her work appears in Obsidian, North American Review. African American Review, Solstice, and elsewhere. Phantom Hue (CavanKerry Press) is her debut collection.

Akhim Yuseff Cabey was born in the Bronx and educated upstate both at Siena College and SUNY Albany. After receiving an MFA from The Ohio State University, he taught at the university level before pivoting to the non-profit sector of adult education. A Pushcart Prize-winning Black author, he is a six-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and a Headlands Center for the Arts resident fellow. Winner of the 2024 Palette Poetry Rising Poet Prize, his work has appeared in Colorado Review, RHINO, Indiana Review, The Florida Review, Shenandoah, and Callaloo.