Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarashina
writer * performer * cultural worker

photo by Jah Grey

 “All of the LGBTIQ community should lift our ears to receive Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Her vision stands to rearrange the ways we approach community, creating art, and loving. Every time I’ve heard her read I’ve come away new.”- Tara Hardy, Bent Writing Institute

" "If you haven’t read any of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha’s incredible feminist essays, you are missing out. Her poetry is as unflinchingly political as her nonfiction, but it also touches on more personal territory of her life as a queer disabled femme Sri Lankan artist. LOVE CAKE is a natural continuation of the themes from her 2006 debut collection, Consensual Genocide: racism, colonial occupation and resistance (“Hurricane”), sex, surviving abuse (“The Best Daughter”), and the importance of community (“sweetest thing/tierra sagrada"). With memorable references to literary icons Cherríe Moraga, bell hooks, and Sonia Sanchez, LOVE CAKE easily convinces readers that Piepzna-Samarsinha’s writing should be shelved right beside them."- Allison McCarthy, Bitch

"“I read a lot of poetry in 2011 as I was working on my own collection, looking at other contemporary poets’ books to see how they make the poems work together, how the poems hold together, or fail to cohere, or purposely resist easy cohesion... My favorite and perhaps the bravest book I read was Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Love Cake (TSAR, 2011)."- Minal Hajratwala, Poets and Writers

"I am not sure how to convey the power of this poetry collection. I can tell you that 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. Upon finishing, I immediately had to call a femme friend to read her a poem that reminded me of her. Relocating from my couch to my bed, I sank in and re-read the entire collection.  I want to say that the poems tore out my heart. I keep seeing an image of my heart getting pulled out of my chest, but my heart does not remain in the air, naked and exposed. Instead, birds carefully wind orange velvet ribbons around it before they replace it in my chest cavity, prettier and stronger than it was before. These poems demand that I feel everything more intensely–including grief and rage–but in return, they give me back something I didn’t know I was missing: an expansive sense of possibility. The morning after I read this collection, I woke up from my sleep with a feeling of anticipation, remembering that I had been given an unexpectedly precious gift that I will carry deep inside me.

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

“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

"In the poetry of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, there's a power that's nearly atomic. Leah makes the colonizer's language submit to her tongue.” - Bushra Rehman, co-editor Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

2012 Lambda Literary Award Winner and 2011 Pushcart Prize nominee Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled Sri Lankan writer, teacher and cultural worker. The author of Consensual Genocide and Love Cake and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities (South End, 2011), her work has appeared in the anthologies 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.

She co-founded Mangos With Chili, the national queer and trans people of color performance organization, is a lead artist with Sins Invalid and teaches with June Jordan's Poetry for the People. In 2010 she was named one of the Feminist Press' “40 Feminists Under 40 Who Are Shaping the Future.”   Her one woman show, Grown Woman Show, has toured nationally, including performances at the National Queer Arts Festival, Swarthmore College, Yale University, Reed College and McGill University. She has taught, performed and lectured across the country, including appearances at Columbia, Oberlin, Texas A&M, Sarah Lawrence, Swarthmore, UC Berkeley, USC, and the University of Toronto. She co-founded Toronto’s Asian Arts Freedom School.

She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, focusing on creative nonfiction and community-based teaching by writers of color.

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Tweets by @brownstargirl

Love Cake has won the 2012 Lambda Literary Award!

In June, I was pleasantly blown away to get a text message  that I won the goddamn Gay Literary Grammies. I am still blown away to win this award for all of us queer, brown, non academic, grassroots writers, poets and cultural workers who deserve to live in history.


If you click on the image to the left, it'll take you to TSAR Publication's website, where you can order it directly.

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New chapbook, Bodymap, available for sale

I am pleased to announce that a small new chapbook of my poetry, Bodymap, is available for sale. Containing new work on love, sex, disability and home, I am proud to be able to share new work. Price: $5-8, sliding scale. Please email me with the quantity you would like, and your mailing address, at brownstargirl @ gmail.com.

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Order The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities

It's finally here! Seven years in the making, The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities, edited by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, was released by South End Press in May 2011! Order your copy, email if you'd like to book a reading or event, and watch this space for tour information!

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For bookings or inquires, please email brownstargirl@gmail.com