Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s speech and poetry somehow cut straight to the bone while still taking the longgg way around a giant, baroquely beautiful elaborate loop of the sweetest salty flavor. She’ll bring baby crips and seasoned born in the caul disabled for life old heads to the same cul-de-sac at least for the length of a poem—and maybe into next lifetime. Come for the crip ingenuity; stay for the smooth feels of what it is to be each other’s everything. Piepzna-Samarasinha knows care in worlds beyond words and always finds just the right thing to say in serving the already ongoing end of the world as we know it.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is is a queer disabled femme writer, organizer, performance artist and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. They are the Lambda Award winning author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap, Love Cake and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. A lead artist with Sins Invalid and the co-founder of Mangos With Chili, she is a VONA fellow and holds an MFA from Mills College.

This event was documented with photographs, video and audio recordings. The recordings are not yet publically availble, please contact us for specific viewing requests.