Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (born April 21, 1975 in Worcester, Massachusetts) is a Toronto and Oakland-based poet, writer, educator and social activist. Her writing and performance art focuses on documenting the stories of queer and trans people of color, abuse survivors, mixed-race people and diasporic South Asians and Sri Lankans. A central concern of her work is the interconnection of systems of colonialism, abuse and violence.

Piepzna-Samarasinha was born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. She graduated from Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts in New York City in 1997.

Her writing has been published in the anthologies Homelands: Women's Journeys Across Race, Time and Place, Bitchfest, We Don't Need Another Wave, Undoing Border Imperialism, Colonize This!,Dangerous Families, Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn, the Lambda Literary Award-nominated Brazen Femme, Without a Net, Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws and A Girl’s Guide To Taking Over the World.

In April 2006 Piepzna-Samarasinha published Consensual Genocide (TSAR Publications), her first collection of work.

The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities, which she co-edited with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, was published by South End Press in May 2011.

Her second book of poetry, Love Cake, was published by TSAR Publications in fall 2011 and won the Lambda Literary Award in 2012.

Bodymap was published in 2015 by Mawenzi House. In it she sings a queer disabled femme-of-colour love song filled with hard femme poetics and disability justice. In this volume, Leah Lakshmi maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim and deserve.

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