Lambda Literary Award finalist
In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha ran away from America with two backpacks and ended up in Canada, where she discovered queer anarchopunk love and revolution, yet remained haunted by the reasons she left home in the first place. This passionate and riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it reveals how a disabled queer woman of color and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the past and, as the subtitle suggests, "dreams her way home."
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's poetry book Love Cake won a Lambda Literary Award.

Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

Biographies & Memoirs

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi

Arts & Literature

Arsenal Pulp Press

In this collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award–winning writer and longtime activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all. Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a tool kit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

Health, Fitness & Dieting

In their fourth collection of poetry, Lambda Literary Award-winning poet and writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha continues her excavation of working-class queer brown femme survivorhood and desire. Tonguebreaker is about surviving the unsurvivable: living through hate crimes, the suicides of queer kin, and the rise of fascism while falling in love and walking through your beloved’s Queens neighborhood. Building on her groundbreaking work in Bodymap, Tonguebreaker is an unmitigated force of disabled queer-of-color nature, narrating disabled femme-of-color moments on the pulloff of the 80 in West Oakland, the street, and the bed. Tonguebreaker dreams unafraid femme futures where we live&amp;emdash;a ritual for our collective continued survival.

Tonguebreaker

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if the majority of people will be disabled in the near future - and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom become crucial if we're going to create a future where surviving fascism, climate change, and pandemics and creating liberation are possible? Building on the work&nbsp;of her game-changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other - and the rest&nbsp;of the world - alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy.&nbsp; Written over the course of two years of disabled&nbsp;isolation during the pandemic,&nbsp;this is a&nbsp;book of love letters to other disabled

The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs

Community & Culture

There are many ways for a family to be: spread out, packed together, close, far or always moving. This family lives in two houses connected by a bridge of flowers. When the bridge falls apart one stressful day, Mona and her sibling Kumar make magic to restore it--with a surprising result! It's a good thing that everyone had a little magic inside, especially when they're trying to care for the people they love.

Bridge of Flowers

Children's Books

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Flamingo Rampant

Poetry. Gay & Lesbian Studies. Asian Studies. This long-awaited first collection of poetry by queer Sri Lankan writer and spoken-word artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is full of the stories we've been waiting for. Tracing bloodlines from Sri Lanka's civil wars to Brooklyn and Toronto streets, these fierce poems are full of heart and guts, telling raw truths about brown girl border crossings before and after 9/11, surviving abuse, mixed-race journeys and high femme rebellions. Consensual Genocide celebrates our survival and marks our rebel memories into history. "Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's words leap off the page--urgent, sumptuous writing that demands, and deserves, a wide audience. I'm listening"--Anna Camilleri.

Consensual Genocide

TSAR Publications

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.

Love Cake

In Bodymap, Lambda Award-winner Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha sings a queer disabled femme-of-colour love song filled with hard femme poetics and disability justice. The first book of the author to examine disability from a queer femme-of-colour lens, Bodymap contains work created and performed with Sins Invalid. Bodymap maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim and deserve.

Bodymap

Mawenzi House Publishers Ltd.

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Books by Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi