“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

“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

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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