Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/them) is a writer, connector/ femme with the hookup, 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.
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 fifth book of poetry, The Way Disabled People Love Each Other, is forthcoming spring 2026 from Arsenal Pulp Press and their memoir, Kunju, is in progress.
A 2020-2021 Disability Futures Fellow, they founded and run Living Altars, space by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers/creators, and founded and run The Stacey Park Milbern Liberation Arts Residency, a writing residency by/for disabled QTBIPOC writers. With Alice Wong and Jane Shi they created Crips for eSims for Gaza, a global disabled lead initiative raising money to buy eSims to help keep Palestine connected to the internet.
Their work has been widely anthologized and published/self-published, including recent and forthcoming work in Disability Intimacy, Foglifter, Truthout, The Portable Feminist Reader, Eater, Disability Visibility Project and The Massachusetts Review but with a long-ass CV before that. They collaborate 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.
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 2009-2018 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.)
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 live in Philly/ Lenepehoking after being a long time visitor. They are powered by hyperfocus, the silence, the cackle and the couch.
