Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/them) is a portal, connector coment, writer, older cousin, cultural and memory worker, divinator, writing teacher, space creator, low-tech survival technologist and old head structural engineer of disability and transformative justice work. Telling a story is still their primary form of tech.
An Aries/ Taurus four horns compulsive maker and documenter, they are the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Bridge of Flowers, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap, The Revolution Starts At Home (co-edited with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani), Love Cake and Consensual Genocide. Their work has been widely anthologized and published/self-published, including recent work in Eater, Disability Visibility Project and The Massachusetts Review but with a long-ass CV before that. They make marvelous things/ performance/ ritual with other disabled mostly BIPOC creators/family, most recently Kinetic Light’s Wired and the i wanna be with you everywhere crew. They curated Poets.org’s 2021 disabled and D(d)eaf poetry folio and created the disabled pandemic grief portal, remembering the disabled beloved dead lost during 2020-2023, for i wanna be with you everywhere and (soon) elsewhere.
A Lambda Award winner who has been shortlisted for the Publishing Triangle five times, Piepzna-Samarasinha won Lambda’s 2020 Jeanne Córdova Award “honoring a lifetime of work documenting the complexities of queer of color/ disabled/ femme experience.” From 2009-201 they were a lead performer with disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid. They co-founded Toronto’s Asian Arts Freedom School (2005-2009) the QTPOC floating cabaret and performance tour/ art apocalypse Mangos With Chili (2006-2015) and Toronto’s Performance/Disability/Art (PDA) (2014- present.)
A 2020-2021 Disability Futures Fellow and YBCA 100 member, they are currently building Living Altars, building power and space by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers/creators.
They are Jackie and Anna’s grandfemme, from Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Ukrainian/Galician/Rom lineage, sick, disabled and autistic, a nonbinary femme on the stoop, a survivor and a grown up runaway making home and family. Raised in Worcester, MA, they are a new Philly resident after being a long-time visiting cousin. They are powered by hyperfocus, the silence, the cackle and the couch.
Their next book of poetry, The Way Disabled People Love Each Other, is forthcoming spring 2026 from Arsenal Pulp Press.
