One of our favorite episodes of AAWW Radio was from 2018 and features Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice author Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in conversation with poet Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, author of SLINGSHOT. Leah reads from her work and together they discuss meaningful inclusion of disability justice, intersectional disability, and ask, how do collective care, disability justice, and sick and disabled Black and brown femmes save the world and each other during this time of apocalypse?

In their essay collection Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha outlines what it means to create spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of color, and creative “collective access”—access not as a chore but as a collective responsibility and pleasure —in our communities and political movements. Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer & people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a toolkit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. 

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a writer and author of SLINGSHOT, their forthcoming book of poetry, and a founding member of The Harriet Tubman Collective and Deaf Poets Society.