bio
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled nonbinary femme writer and cultural worker of Burger/ Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/ Roma ascent. The author of Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home (Publisher's Triangle and Lambda Award 2016 finalist, American Library Association Stonewall Award winner 2016), Bodymap (Audre Lorde Poetry Award Finalist, Publisher's Triangle), Love Cake (Lambda Award winner 2012) and Consensual Genocide, she is also co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. Her work has been widely published, most recently in The Deaf Poets Society, Glitter and Grit and Octavia's Brood, and including work in the anthologies Dear Sister, Undoing Border Imperialism, Stay Solid, Persistence: Still Butch and Femme, Yes Means Yes, Visible: A Femmethology, Homelands, Colonize This, We Don’t Need Another Wave, Bitchfest, Without a Net, Dangerous Families, Brazen Femme, Femme and A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over The World.
From 2006-2016, she co-founded and co-directed Mangos With Chili, North America's longest running queer and trans people of color performance art tour. She is currently a lead artist with the disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid, co founded Toronto' Asian Arts Freedom School. Primarily, she is a weirdo who writes about survivorhood, disability justice, transformative justice, queer femme of color lives and Sri Lankan diaspora sitting in her room. In 2010 she was named one of the Feminist Press' 40 Feminists Under 40 Shaping the Future and she is a 2013 Autostraddle Hot 105 member. For bookings, interviews or other inquires, please email brownstargirl@gmail.com
Praisesongs:
“Piepzna-Samarasinha offers us a collective roadmap for living untamed, uncategorizable lives.”- Bitch "(Dirty River) serves as a queer, disabled, punk of color manifesto that forces readers to open doors and go to places that have long been shut tight... If you are looking for an incredible book that is unlike anything else you have ever read, pick up Dirty River. You can thank me later." - Manjeet Birk, Herizons "(Leah's work) paints a portrait of crippled body sovereignty in a world that would rather isolate us until we disappear." - Cyree Jarelle Johnson, Deaf Poets Society “Leah's poems are rebel songs and love songs that bear witness and fight back - as miraculous, as mean, as stunning as every queer brown girl who survives." -Qwo-Li Driskill, author of Walking with Ghosts: Poems "With memorable references to Cherrie Moraga, bell hooks and Sonia Sanchez... Piepzna-Samarasinha's writing should be shelved right beside them." - Allison McCarthy, Bitch Magazine. "Once I picked up Love Cake, I could not put it down until I finished every poem, even though I sometimes had to read through my tears... The gift of this poetry collection is nothing less than a roadmap to what liberation can look like for queer people who survive personal and collective trauma." -Wendy Elisheva Somerson, Tikkun |
News Feed:
Sounds Like Fire: Femme4Femme performance with Amber Dawn, Kai Cheng Thom and Kama La Mackarel, Verses Festival, Vancouver/ Coast Salish Territories, April 25, 2017 new writing classes online announced for 2017 Adept: A Sick and Disabled Queer Show premiers at Gay City, Calamus Theater, Seattle, WA! Tickets still available for Saturday January 28, 2017. New fall 2016 tour dates: Portland, Sins Invalid, Oakland, Baltimore, Western MA, San Francisco, Hugo House Seattle. New reviews of Bodymap and Dirty River in Herizons, Deaf Poets Society, Make/Shift and Room Leah performing in Sins Invalid's October 2016 show, Birthing, Dying, Becoming Crip Wisdom. Leah reads work on PBS Newshour New writing featured in The Deaf Poet's Society Bodymap included on Autostraddle Crip Lit Syllabus Bodymap and Dirty River Both Finalists for Publishing Triangle Awards Dirty River finalist for Lambda Award for Lesbian Memoir Leah included in The Body Is Not An Apology's 10 Queer and Non-Binary People of Color Using Art and Media to Get Free. "Messy, Beautiful Queers" A Review of Dirty River and The Argonauts in Bitch Magazine New Tour Dates: Portland, Tucson, New York, Ottawa, more "Don't Date Anyone Who Treats You Like Shit, Even A Little" An appreciation by Kai Chang on Autostraddle Autostraddle reviews Dirty River Dirty River makes Vancouver Sun Top 20 Books of 2015 Leah makes Colorlines 15 Women of Color Who Rocked 2015 Fuck “The Triumph of the Human Spirit”: On Writing Dirty River, Queer Disabled Femme of Color Memoir and The Joys Of Saying Fuck You to Traditional Abuse Survivor Narratives- blog post on Third Woman Press Dirty River makes Autostraddle Top 10 Queer and Feminist books of 2015 Dirty River reviewed in Globe and Mail:"a biracial-abuse-survivor-queer-femme-working-class-immigrant-anarchist-punk bomb exploding this myth of LGBT sameness...a kind of oral history and love letter to Toronto as it was in a weedier, less shiny time." Dirty River reviewed on Lambda Literary Review, November 15 2015 Bodymap reviewed by Hermana Resist Press Vancouver Sun reviews Dirty River: " In rapid fire, intensely felt and perfectly controlled prose, the activist/poet/survivor evokes the terrors and pleasures of life in the pockets of counter culture, gender rebellion and anti-racist groups she found in Toronto ... The authorial voice is propulsive, eloquent and absolutely persuasive. " Dirty River October Dates Announced: New York, Toronto, Peterborough, Ottawa, Montreal Applications Open, Hard Femme Poetics Workshop, September 2015 Feministing Reads: Bodymap by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, July 24 2015 Sweet Blossoms Out Of the Crater: A Review of Bodymap, Tikkun, July 20, 2015 Dirty River Makes CBC's Fall 2015 Book Preview, July 10, 2015 All That You Touch, You Change: A Conversation with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Bitch Media Interview, June 24 2015 Autostraddle Read A F*cking Book Review: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is Living Her Truths in “Bodymap”May 5, 2015 
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