{"id":523,"date":"2012-06-15T19:35:04","date_gmt":"2012-06-15T19:35:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/library.ryerson.ca\/asianheritage\/authors\/leah-lakshmi-piepzna-samarasinha\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T20:39:56","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T00:39:56","slug":"piepzna","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/authors\/piepzna\/","title":{"rendered":"Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha was born in Northeastern United States, and now resides in Toronto, Ontario. Their ethnic heritage is Burgher\/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish\/Roma. In addition to writing, teaching and cultural work, she\/they is a spoken-word artist who has performed throughout Canada and the United States. They\/she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. In the fall of 2018, Piepzna-Samarasinha published a collection of essays entitled Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice<\/em><\/a>. Expanding on this title, they published The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs<\/a> in 2022. Piepzna-Samarasinha is the 2020 winner of the Jeanne C\u00f3rdova Prize for Lesbian\/Queer Nonfiction<\/a> from the Lambda Literary organization.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Poetry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Bodymap: Poems<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Toronto: Mawenzi House, 2015.
PS8631.I46 B63 2015<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publisher’s Synopsis<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In Bodymap<\/em>, 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<\/em> contains work created and performed with Sins Invalid. Bodymap<\/em> maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim and deserve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Awards and Honours<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

2015 Publishing Triangle Audre Lord Award for Lesbian Poetry<\/a> (Finalist)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Poetry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Consensual Genocide<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Toronto: TSAR Books, 2006.
PS8631 .I46 C65 2006<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publisher’s Synopsis<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> celebrates our survival and marks our rebel memories into history.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Poetry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Love Cake: Poems<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Toronto: TSAR Books, 2011.
PS8631 .I46 L69 2011<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publisher’s Synopsis<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In Love Cake<\/em>, [the author] 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<\/em> documents the persistence of survival and beauty–especially the dangerous beauty found in queer people of colour’s lives. …<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Awards and Honours<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

2012 Lambda Literary Award<\/a>, Lesbian Poetry (Winner)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Poetry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Tonguebreaker: Poems and Performance Texts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019.
PS8631 .I46 T66 2019<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tonguebreaker<\/em> 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 neighbourhood in Queens. Building on her groundbreaking work in Bodymap<\/em>, Tonguebreaker<\/em> is an unmitigated force of disabled queer-of-colour nature, narrating disabled femme-of-colour moments on the pulloff of the 80 in West Oakland, the street, and the bed. Tonguebreaker<\/em> dreams unafraid femme futures where we live — a ritual for our collective continued survival.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Poetry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Way Disabled People Love Each Other: Poems<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Lambda Award-winning poet, memoirist, and disability justice movement worker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha returns with their long-awaited fifth collection of poems, written over five years of pandemic lockdown, during which time they lost a cherished friend and comrade and met their estranged parents’ end of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Way Disabled People Love Each Other<\/em> is a fierce crip reckoning with all the ways disabled people love each other, in all our complexity. A book that will speak to any kind of griever, but particularly disabled BIPOC queer trans ones sitting with the endless mass grief and possibility of this time, and those with violent family from whom we still yearn to claw out beauty from the trauma rubble. It’s a road map for survivors looking for something that’s neither a happy Hollywood ending nor a transformative justice fairy tale – not the healing we wished for, but the healing we find anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This collection is a rigorous, rueful documentation of a specific time of pandemic fascist grief and possibility. Brimming with odes, elegies, and mourning songs, these poems sparkle like switchblades and offer new possibilities for love, grief, and memory.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Non-fiction (Memoir\/Autobiography)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015.
PS8631 .I46 Z53 2015<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publisher’s Synopsis<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, carrying only two backpacks, caught a Greyhound bus in America and ran away to Canada. They ended up in Toronto, where they were welcomed by a community of queer punks of colour offering promises of love and revolution, yet they remained haunted by the reasons she left home in the first place. This passionate, riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it is an intensely personal road map and an intersectional, tragicomic tale that reveals how a disabled queer woman of colour and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the not-so-distant past and, as the subtitle suggests, “dreams their way home.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Awards and Honours<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

2016 Lambda Literary Award<\/a>–Lesbian Memoir\/Biography (Finalist)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Links<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Piepzna-Samarasinha personal website<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publisher Arsenal Pulp Press<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publisher Mawenzi House<\/a> (formerly TSAR)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interview by Rachna Contractor in Plenitude Magazine<\/a> (21 March 2017)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha was born in Northeastern United States, and now resides in Toronto, Ontario. Their ethnic heritage is Burgher\/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish\/Roma. In addition to writing, teaching and cultural work, she\/they is a spoken-word artist who has performed … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":16,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-523","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22000,"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/523\/revisions\/22000"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}