Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (b. April 21, 1975 in Worcester, Massachusetts) is a Toronto-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.

Published works
Her writing has been published in the anthologies Homelands: Women's Journeys Across Race, Time and Place, Bitchfest, We Don't Need Another Wave, Colonize This!, Dangerous Families, 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. http://www.southendpress.org/2010/items/87941. Her second book of poetry, Love Cake, is forthcoming from TSAR Publications in fall 2011.

Piepzna-Samarasinha's freelance journalism can be seen in magazines such as Colorlines, NOW, Xtra, Bitch, Bamboo Girl, Herizons and other publications, where she focuses on documenting LGBT of color artists and activists.

Her work has been reviewed in Canadian Literature.

Performance work
As a spoken word artist she has performed widely in the United States, Canada and Sri Lanka. She has featured at Bar 13, Michelle Tea's RADAR Reading Series, The Loft, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, as well as at universities including Yale, Sarah Lawrence, Oberlin, Swarthmore and the University of Southern California. Her first one woman show, Grown Woman Show, debuted at Toronto's Alchemy Theatre in August 2007.

In her one-woman show, Grown Woman Show Piepzna-Samarasinha talks about being "a queer girl of Sri Lankan descent", and claims that she was a victim of  incest perpetrated by her mother. Grown Woman Show has been performed at at the National Queer Arts Festival, Swarthmore College, Yale University, Reed College and McGill University.

In April 2007, Piepzna-Samarasinha and Maria Cristina Rangel, aka Cherry Galette, launched Mangos With Chili, a "floating cabaret" annual tour of  queer and transgender people of color writers, dancers and performance artists, "like Sister Spit, only all brown." Since 2004, she has curated and produced Toronto's Browngirlworld series of spoken word performance nights by queer and trans artists of color. She is also involved with the biannual Asian Pacific Islander Spoken Word and Poetry Summit.

She was the 2009-2010 Artist in Residence at UC Berkeley’s June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. From 2009 to the present, she has been a commissioned performer with Sins Invalid, the national performance organization of queer people with disabilities and chronic illnesses.

Teaching
Even though Piepzna-Samarasinha has no college degree, she teaches writing to LGBT youth at Supporting Our Youth Toronto (SOY), and, with Gein Wong, is an organizer of the Asian Arts Freedom School, a writing, performance and activist education program for Asian/Pacific Islander youth. She is also involved with The Canadian Sri Lankan Women's Action Network, an activist group seeking to promote peace with justice through a feminist lens to end Sri Lanka's 24 year civil war.

Awards
Piepzna-Samarasinha is the 2009 Bent Institute Mentor of the Bent Writing Institute of Seattle, WA. Piepzna-Samarasinha is a 2004 recipient of the City of Toronto's Community Service Volunteer Awards.