Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they) is a queer, autistic, disabled nonbinary femme writer, disability and transformative justice movement worker, curator, and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma descent. Piepzna-Samarasinha was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. They earned their BA from the Eugene Lang College at The New School.

Piepzna-Samarasinha is the author of several poetry collections, including Consensual Genocide (2006); Love Cake (2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; Bodymap (2015); and Tonguebreaker (2019). They also wrote several nonfiction books, including Dirty River (2015); Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018); and The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs (2022).

Piepzna-Samarasinha’s writing often reflects her identity as a queer, disabled writer of Sri Lankan heritage. Their work has been anthologized in A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World (1997), Colonize This (2002), BITCHfest (2006), Visible: A Femmethology, Volume Two (2010), Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme (2011), and Octavia’s Brood (2015). She is coeditor, along with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (2011).

In 2006, Piepzna-Samarasinha cofounded Mangos with Chili, a performance arts incubator for queer and trans people of color now based in the Bay Area. They also perform with the disability justice incubator Sins Invalid and cofounded Toronto’s Asian Arts Freedom School. She won the 2020 Lambda Jeanne Córdova Award, which honors “lesbian/queer-identified women and trans/gender non-conforming nonfiction authors.” Piepzna-Samarasinha was a 2020–2021 Disability Futures Fellow. They split their time between Toronto and Seattle.