Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they) is a queer disabled nonbinary femme writer, educator and disability/transformative justice worker of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent.  They are the author or co-editor of nine books, including most recently, co-edited with Ejeris Dixon, Beyond Survival, Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement, Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice,  Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home (ALA Above the Rainbow List, short-listed for the Lambda and Publishing Triangle Awards), Bodymap (short-listed for the Publishing Triangle Award), Love Cake (Lambda Literary Award winner), and consensual Genocide, with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, she co-edited The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. They are the 2020 recipient of the Lambda Foundation’s Jeanne Cørdova Prize in Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, recognizing “a lifetime of work documenting the complexity of queer experience” and are also the recipient of the groundbreaking 2020 US Artists Disability Futures Fellowship.