Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Writer & Performance Artist
they, them, theirs, she, her, hers
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled nonbinary femme writer, performer, space creator, freedom dreamer, and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Roma ascent. Piepzna-Samarasinha is the 2020 winner of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Jean Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction. She is the author and co-editor of nine books, including Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Bridge of Flowers, Bodymap, Dirty River, The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities (co-edited with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani), Love Cake, and Consensual Genocide. Piepzna-Samarasinha has been a lead artist for the disability justice performance collective, Sins Invalid, since 2009, co-created Performance/Disability/Art, Mangos With Chili, and Toronto’s Asian Arts Freedom School, and is on the programming team for the Disability and Intersectionality Summit. They believe in the power of storytelling and witnessing, being an everyday-ass human being, the power of disability justice to create an abolitionist present and future, crip and Crazy person brilliance, and the unpredictable future.