Chapter 6: Still Dreaming Wild Disability Justice Dreams at the End of the World

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they) is a queer nonbinary femme disabled writer, performance artist, and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish, and Galician/Roma ascent. They are the author or co-editor of ten books, including (with Ejeris Dixon) Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, Tonguebreaker, Bridge of Flowers, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, and Bodymap. A Lambda Award winner who has been shortlisted for the Publishing Triangle five times, she is winner of Lambda’s 2020 Jean Cordova Award “honoring a lifetime of work documenting the complexities of queer of color, disabled, and femme experience,” and is a 2020–2021 Disability Futures Fellow. Since 2009, they have been a lead performer with disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid; since 2020 they have been on the programming team of the Disability & Intersectionality Summit. Raised in rust belt central Massachusetts and shaped by T'karonto and Oakland, they are currently at work building Living Altars, an organization creating space for disabled QTBIPOC writers, including the Stacey Park Milbern Liberation Arts Center, an accessible writing retreat for disabled BIPOC creators. They are a hot, haggard porch and couch witch and a very unprofessional adaptive trike rider.