Hybrid Poetry Event with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

In collaboration with the Arts and Culture Project at Access Living, we are thrilled to host a hybrid event for the new poetry collection by author and disability justice movement worker, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha!

All are welcome! Please join us online or in person. Please register if you plan to attend either in-person or virtually, as the Zoom Webinar link will be sent to attendees prior to the event.

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.

The Way Disabled People Love Each Other 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.

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.

LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA (they/them) is a disabled writer, disability and transformative justice cultural worker and notorious hot bitch of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Ukrainian/Galician/Roma ascent. They are the author or co-editor of eleven books, including The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs; Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon); Tonguebreaker; and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. A Lambda and Jeanne Córdova Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle shortlister and longtime disabled QTBIPOC space maker, they are currently building Living Altars, connecting and building power by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers, and the Stacey Park Milbern Liberation Art Residency, North America’s only writers’ residency by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers. Raised in Worcester, MA, with roots in Toronto, Seattle and Oakland, they currently live in Lenapehoking/ Philadelphia. They are Jackie and Anna’s grandfemme, a non-binary femme on the stoop, a survivor and grown-up runaway making home and family. They are powered by hyperfocus, the silence, the cackle and the couch. Follow them at brownstargirl.org and their Substack, Postcards from the End of the World llps.substack.com.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required for this event. We have one industrial air purifier, two smaller air purifiers, and four ceiling fans throughout our space. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. This is a hybrid event with a virtual component on Zoom Webinar and CART captioning will be provided. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. For other access needs please email .

This event is brought to you by the Arts and Culture Project at Access Living, an independent living center for people with disabilities; Shirley Ryan Abilities Lab; and the Disability Culture Activism Lab (DCAL), a teaching lab housed under the department of art therapy and counseling at SAIC. This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

The contents of this program were developed under a grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR grant number 90RTCP0005). NIDILRR is a Center within the Administration for Community Living (ACL), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Workshop content does not necessarily represent the policy of NIDILRR, ACL, or HHS, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

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