Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/she) is a writer, older cousin, cultural and memory worker, divinator, writing teacher, space creator, low-tech survival technologist and 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.” Since 2009 they have been a lead performer with disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid; since 2020 they have been on the programming committee of the Disability and Intersectionality Summit. 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.
