Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

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.  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,  and,Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home.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.  A Disability Futures Fellow, they are currently creating 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 have home in Toronto/T’karonto, South Seattle, their body, with the beloved dead and in the disabled brown imaginary.  They are a new Philly resident after being a long-time visiting cousin.