MEET LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA
“I think as disabled people we dream a lot of wild shit into existence that the powers that be and ablest reality could never imagine.”
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, courtesy of the artist
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they) 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. Telling a story is still their primary form of tech.
An Aries/ Taurus four horns compulsive maker and documenter, 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, Bridge of Flowers, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap, The Revolution Starts At Home (co-edited with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani), Love Cake and Consensual Genocide. Their work has been widely anthologized and self-published, including recent work in Eater, Disability Visibility Project and The Massachusetts Review but with a long-ass CV before that. They make marvelous things/ performance/ ritual with other disabled mostly BIPOC creators/family, most recently Kinetic Light’s Wired and the i wanna be with you everywhere crew. They curated Poets.org’s disabled and D(d)eaf poetry folio and created the disabled grief transformation portal altar, remembering the disabled beloved dead lost during 2020-2023, for i wanna be with you everywhere and (soon) elsewhere.
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; since 2020 they have been on the programming committee of the Disability and Intersectionality Summit. They co-founded Toronto’s Asian Arts Freedom School (2005-2009) the QTPOC floating cabaret and performance tour/ art apocalypse Mangos With Chili (2006-2015) and Toronto’s Performance/Disability/Art (PDA) (2014- present.) A Disability Futures Fellow, they are currently building 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 web and imaginary. They are a new Philly resident after being a long-time visiting cousin.
Work
“Palestine is Disabled,” Disability Visibility Project
“Crip Infinity,” ANMLY
“Crips for eSims for Gaza,” Disability Visibility Project
mentor profile
Queer|Art|Mentorship will be accepting applications from emerging artists across the country. Are you open to working with someone remotely, or would you prefer they are based in the same city as you?
“Remote or Philly is great.”
What interests you about mentoring?
“Supporting rising working class, disabled/neurodivergent, QTBIPOC artists.”
Given your experience and interests, what kind of emerging artist do you feel best positioned to support?
“Writers, performance artists, disabled/ND QTBIPOC ones.”
As a mentor, what would you like to offer an emerging artist? What would you like to receive?
“Real talk, listening, concrete skills around negotiating publishing, money, contracts but also ones about building accessible ways of writing, esp writing trauma, and building a writing life. I want to offer knowledge with respect and good boundaries with my mentee.”
Have you had mentors of your own? Who have they been?
“Oh tons! Nalo Hopkinson is one who comes to mind going way back, Bear Bergman, Patty Berne, Leroy Moore, but also within disability justice writing and arts world there are so many of us who peer mentor each other.”