Leah's bio:
Winner of the 2012 Lambda Literary Award, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer, teacher, performer and healer/organizer of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan, Roma and Irish ascent. She walks in the legacies of her Roma great grandmother who walked out of Galicia to the Black Sea with thirteen children while healing people at her kitchen table campfires along the way and her Sri Lankan bicycle riding school teacher grandmother and great aunties who kept managing to not be arrested while enjoying sex and cute clothes. The author of Love Cake and Consensual Genocide and the co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities, her writing on femme identity, transformative justice, healing justice and queer of color lives has been widely anthologized. She is the co-founder of the queer people of color arts incubator Mangos With Chili, a lead artist with Sins Invalid and co-founder of Toronto's Asian Arts Freedom School. In 2010 she was named one of the Feminist Press' 40 Feminists Under 40 Shaping the Future and she is an 2013 Autostraddle Alternative Hot 105 member. Her first memoir, Dirty River, is forthcoming from Arsenal Pulp Press in fall 2015.
