ok, it's also up at "upcoming", but just for the hell of it, here's all where I'll be in October/November. Look for November appearances in the Bay and at Scripps U, too.
but first, here's a new poem I'm very proud of:
this is what I did with my broken heart
- for all my loved and longing ones
this morning, heartbreak farmer's market splurge of dahlias on the dining room table, a girlsister choosing her new name after ecstatic silence, my heart opened in a beloved's poem. colors and cosmos cupped in a cleavage exploding heart, all our names spoken perfect and kissed on black and brown butterfly lips.
some days sistergirl brings you the tallest bouquet of flowers, tips brushing the ceiling. she won't tell you where they come from, it is her secret to pamper you. cook kale and basil and grill that tofu. paint the kitchen cabinets an intense teal that's been on the shelf for six months. some days I crawl in bed and lick my heart with whiskey and a fantasy novel I'm embarrassed to check out of the library, that still medicates. an infinity of sickbed text messages, you slept through the food stamp appointment again, so did I. the sun sets and rises again, that bumpy lemonade yellow east bay sun brushing the morning wet of uncut grass garden I walk through, 36 years old to a kitchen's coffee. some mornings make me cry at my kitchen table morning coffee why don't you/ bless me with exploding flowers in cleavage and all our names spoken.
love is waiting for me. fighting to stay alive so I can walk towards her. find her in the fort she created for us. grown over with wild ivy that could uproot this house, cover the plum tree. love is waiting for me to walk towards her. as I have walked and limped towards her so many times before.
overdraw the bank account, paycheck made out to the wrong name in my pocket. practice breathing and runwalk to chase, slip in check just in time for pending debits and credits. remember that this crazy broken poor is why I poet. is checks and ballances on the account sheet of my life.
love is waiting for you. why do you want to keep her waiting? she is waiting for you to walk towards her, stumble over her, fall on your face and smash it open into the biggest grin. get up and your teeth are just fine. your next love is waiting for you. she might be yourself. why would you keep her waiting? love is waiting for you, a country of wild vines, figs droping into my hand that I have never seen, that I would recognize anywhere. her skin under my fingers, the curves of her nose and cheek. where falling open into oya is brushed with kitten feather softness. where I will never break my face again.
and now, the tour doc:
So, as you may have gathered, I'm going on this ginormous tour of life and death this October and November in the Northeast to launch Love Cake, my new book of poetry, and to do some workshops along the way. I'm still confirming some times and locations, but since October is soon, here is the giant document of life and death:
With Gay Genius Ontario Tour:
October 6: Brock University, St Catherine's, ON
October 14th, George Brown College, Toronto, ON
October 15, Gay Genius launch, Unit 2, Toronto, ON
October 16, LOVE CAKE TORONTO LAUNCH, Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen St. West, Toronto ON
7:30 doors, 8:00 show. music, sweet video of QTPOC talking about what love sex and healing is to us, opening performers, three kinds of love cake, me performing, book signing, dancing, drinks, free, fully wheelchair accessible including bathrooms, free childcare, all ages rest of access tbc by Friday. FB invite here: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=250546331654653
October 24-25 Hampshire College, Amherst MA.
Monday October 24 performance, 7 PM, location TBA
Tuesday, October 25th, transformative justice workshop
October 26, NYU, 8 PM, location TBC: I'm performing representing Sins Invalid, and will be performing pieces from the 2009 and 2011 SIns shows within a medly of work by Leroy Moore, Aurora Levins Morales, Loree Erickson and more! it's gonna amaze. FREE, open to everyone not just NYU students
October 28, New York launch, Love Cake, as part of RUCKUS, a queer and trans people of color reading series. Bluestockings Books, 172 Allan St, NY NY 10003. free, 7 PM to 9 PM, magical opening acts TBC
October 30-21, Swathmore College, Swathmore, PA
November 3, UConn, talk about Revolution Starts at Home with Ching-In Chen
November 4-5, Wesleyan University, Middletown CT. Nov 4th performance, November 5 workshop
November 6-7, reading and workshop, Brattleboro VT, Everybody's Books.
What is Gay Genius? Gay Genius is a comics anthology illuminating the past, present and future of queer history makers. It is a labor of love, a celebration of possibility, an offering to the ancestors. Conceived and edited by Annie Murphy, Gay Genius is a showcase of contemporary radical queer visionaries-to-watch-out-for:
What alternative? Whose underground? We feel that queer comics artists/comics artists of color (and cartoonists of other marginalized groups) have always been relegated to the underground of the underground. This just won't do! This is where Gay Genius comes in. With eighteen contributors whose storytelling is as unique as their artistic style, Gay Genius is not just a much-needed volume celebr ating the work of queer artists, but it's a must-have for contemporary comics lovers as well.
Gay Genius contributors Elisha Lim and Leroi Newbold will be hitting this road in October, reading stories and showing slides of our work, and talking about Gay Genius as a historic first anthology of queer comics, as well as its mandate to include queer intersectional identities, like diverse races, ages and abilities. They will be joined by writer, performer and cultural worker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, who will be presenting work in progress from her collaboration in progress with Elisha, 100 Femmes.
What is Love Cake?
In Love Cake, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of colour resist and transform violence through love and desire. Refusing to forget the traumas of post 9/11 Islamophobia, and Sri Lanka's civil war, Love Cake documents the persistence of survival and beauty—especially the dangerous beauty found in queer people of colour's lives. Piepzna-Samarasinha maps the complicated, luscious joy of reclaiming the body and sexuality after abuse, examines a family history of violence with compassion, and celebrates the beautiful resistance of queer people of colour in love and home-making.
Praise for Love Cake:
"Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Love Cake is a book I want to carry with me when I need to remember my body, to remember our ancestors, to rebuild home. Leah's poems are rebel songs and love songs that bear witness and fight back. Love Cake is as miraculous, as mean, as stunning as every queer brown girl who survives."
–Qwo-Li Driskill, author of Walking with Ghosts: Poems
"Only Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha could concoct the secret recipe for Love Cake. One layer of escaped working class girl from Worcester, MA; one layer of long lost Tamil woman returning to her Sri Lankan roots; sweet cream of sexy queer femme on top; unexpected bite into her bittersweet love & trouble triumph healing rebellion. No one knows quite how she makes it; just that we can’t get enough." –Aya de Leon, Director June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, UC Berkeley
"Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Love Cake is a book of poems chronicling the steady kind of love, the grown-up guide to visioning yourself whole with our homemade stories on one arm and our slutty brown femme sister on the other. Love Cake is a necessary book that will heal our communities after heartbreak and push us towards creating our own dreams of liberation."
--Ching-In Chen, author, The Heart's Traffic
Please repost, spread the word, review the books, come out, and support!
for media inquires or booking, email brownstargirl@gmail.com
but first, here's a new poem I'm very proud of:
this is what I did with my broken heart
- for all my loved and longing ones
this morning, heartbreak farmer's market splurge of dahlias on the dining room table, a girlsister choosing her new name after ecstatic silence, my heart opened in a beloved's poem. colors and cosmos cupped in a cleavage exploding heart, all our names spoken perfect and kissed on black and brown butterfly lips.
some days sistergirl brings you the tallest bouquet of flowers, tips brushing the ceiling. she won't tell you where they come from, it is her secret to pamper you. cook kale and basil and grill that tofu. paint the kitchen cabinets an intense teal that's been on the shelf for six months. some days I crawl in bed and lick my heart with whiskey and a fantasy novel I'm embarrassed to check out of the library, that still medicates. an infinity of sickbed text messages, you slept through the food stamp appointment again, so did I. the sun sets and rises again, that bumpy lemonade yellow east bay sun brushing the morning wet of uncut grass garden I walk through, 36 years old to a kitchen's coffee. some mornings make me cry at my kitchen table morning coffee why don't you/ bless me with exploding flowers in cleavage and all our names spoken.
love is waiting for me. fighting to stay alive so I can walk towards her. find her in the fort she created for us. grown over with wild ivy that could uproot this house, cover the plum tree. love is waiting for me to walk towards her. as I have walked and limped towards her so many times before.
overdraw the bank account, paycheck made out to the wrong name in my pocket. practice breathing and runwalk to chase, slip in check just in time for pending debits and credits. remember that this crazy broken poor is why I poet. is checks and ballances on the account sheet of my life.
love is waiting for you. why do you want to keep her waiting? she is waiting for you to walk towards her, stumble over her, fall on your face and smash it open into the biggest grin. get up and your teeth are just fine. your next love is waiting for you. she might be yourself. why would you keep her waiting? love is waiting for you, a country of wild vines, figs droping into my hand that I have never seen, that I would recognize anywhere. her skin under my fingers, the curves of her nose and cheek. where falling open into oya is brushed with kitten feather softness. where I will never break my face again.
and now, the tour doc:
So, as you may have gathered, I'm going on this ginormous tour of life and death this October and November in the Northeast to launch Love Cake, my new book of poetry, and to do some workshops along the way. I'm still confirming some times and locations, but since October is soon, here is the giant document of life and death:
With Gay Genius Ontario Tour:
October 6: Brock University, St Catherine's, ON
October 14th, George Brown College, Toronto, ON
October 15, Gay Genius launch, Unit 2, Toronto, ON
October 16, LOVE CAKE TORONTO LAUNCH, Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen St. West, Toronto ON
7:30 doors, 8:00 show. music, sweet video of QTPOC talking about what love sex and healing is to us, opening performers, three kinds of love cake, me performing, book signing, dancing, drinks, free, fully wheelchair accessible including bathrooms, free childcare, all ages rest of access tbc by Friday. FB invite here: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=250546331654653
October 24-25 Hampshire College, Amherst MA.
Monday October 24 performance, 7 PM, location TBA
Tuesday, October 25th, transformative justice workshop
October 26, NYU, 8 PM, location TBC: I'm performing representing Sins Invalid, and will be performing pieces from the 2009 and 2011 SIns shows within a medly of work by Leroy Moore, Aurora Levins Morales, Loree Erickson and more! it's gonna amaze. FREE, open to everyone not just NYU students
October 28, New York launch, Love Cake, as part of RUCKUS, a queer and trans people of color reading series. Bluestockings Books, 172 Allan St, NY NY 10003. free, 7 PM to 9 PM, magical opening acts TBC
October 30-21, Swathmore College, Swathmore, PA
November 3, UConn, talk about Revolution Starts at Home with Ching-In Chen
November 4-5, Wesleyan University, Middletown CT. Nov 4th performance, November 5 workshop
November 6-7, reading and workshop, Brattleboro VT, Everybody's Books.
What is Gay Genius? Gay Genius is a comics anthology illuminating the past, present and future of queer history makers. It is a labor of love, a celebration of possibility, an offering to the ancestors. Conceived and edited by Annie Murphy, Gay Genius is a showcase of contemporary radical queer visionaries-to-watch-out-for:
What alternative? Whose underground? We feel that queer comics artists/comics artists of color (and cartoonists of other marginalized groups) have always been relegated to the underground of the underground. This just won't do! This is where Gay Genius comes in. With eighteen contributors whose storytelling is as unique as their artistic style, Gay Genius is not just a much-needed volume celebr ating the work of queer artists, but it's a must-have for contemporary comics lovers as well.
Gay Genius contributors Elisha Lim and Leroi Newbold will be hitting this road in October, reading stories and showing slides of our work, and talking about Gay Genius as a historic first anthology of queer comics, as well as its mandate to include queer intersectional identities, like diverse races, ages and abilities. They will be joined by writer, performer and cultural worker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, who will be presenting work in progress from her collaboration in progress with Elisha, 100 Femmes.
What is Love Cake?
In Love Cake, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of colour resist and transform violence through love and desire. Refusing to forget the traumas of post 9/11 Islamophobia, and Sri Lanka's civil war, Love Cake documents the persistence of survival and beauty—especially the dangerous beauty found in queer people of colour's lives. Piepzna-Samarasinha maps the complicated, luscious joy of reclaiming the body and sexuality after abuse, examines a family history of violence with compassion, and celebrates the beautiful resistance of queer people of colour in love and home-making.
Praise for Love Cake:
"Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Love Cake is a book I want to carry with me when I need to remember my body, to remember our ancestors, to rebuild home. Leah's poems are rebel songs and love songs that bear witness and fight back. Love Cake is as miraculous, as mean, as stunning as every queer brown girl who survives."
–Qwo-Li Driskill, author of Walking with Ghosts: Poems
"Only Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha could concoct the secret recipe for Love Cake. One layer of escaped working class girl from Worcester, MA; one layer of long lost Tamil woman returning to her Sri Lankan roots; sweet cream of sexy queer femme on top; unexpected bite into her bittersweet love & trouble triumph healing rebellion. No one knows quite how she makes it; just that we can’t get enough." –Aya de Leon, Director June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, UC Berkeley
"Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Love Cake is a book of poems chronicling the steady kind of love, the grown-up guide to visioning yourself whole with our homemade stories on one arm and our slutty brown femme sister on the other. Love Cake is a necessary book that will heal our communities after heartbreak and push us towards creating our own dreams of liberation."
--Ching-In Chen, author, The Heart's Traffic
Please repost, spread the word, review the books, come out, and support!
for media inquires or booking, email brownstargirl@gmail.com
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