That Riva Lehrer is alive at all is a matter of remarkable luck and coincidence. Had it not been for the fact that in 1958, her mother was working as a researcher in a lab doing groundbreaking work on natal anomalies, Ms. Lehrer might not have long survived her birth. But she benefited from both innovative surgeries—and the visionary attentions of that mother. Now, decades later, Ms. Lehrer has become a leading figure in Disability Culture in the United States, known internationally as a portrait artist whose work challenges staid conceptions of beauty, through images that depict the power and allure of variant bodies—and lives.

On this occasion (as it happens, of the 46th anniversary of the death of her mother), Ms Lehrer will be conversing with Lawrence Weschler, who last year blurbed her extraordinary new memoir, Golem Girl, as follows:

“Oy, what a story: Job, eat your heart out! In Riva Lehrer’s life chronicle, an appalling fate (and I don’t just mean the circumstances of her birth) gets visited upon an invincible character, and the result is a wincing-wise tale, by turns harrowing and hilarious, cut clean through with flecks of grace and beauty.”