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On October 13th, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop celebrates The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs (Arsenal Pulp Press, October 22), Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s highly anticipated collection of essays. An expansion of Leah’s prolific book Care Work (Arsenal Pulp, 2018), Leah asks, “What if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it’s possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics, and to bring about liberation?” 

Join us for this evening centering disability justice, care and mutual aid, community, and disabled art as a source of radical joy! Leah will be joined in conversation by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson. 

Pre-order The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs from our friends at Bluestockings Bookstore!

// NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY //
This event will be live captioned, and will include ASL Interpretation by Pro Bono ASL.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they) is a nonbinary femme autistic disabled writer, space creator and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Galician/Roma ascent. They are the author or co-editor of ten books, including (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon) Beyond Survival; Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, and Bodymap. 

A Lambda Award winner who has been shortlisted for the Publishing Triangle five times, she is winner of Lambda’s 2020 Jean Cordova Award “honoring a lifetime of work documenting the complexities of queer of color/ disabled/ femme experience.” They are a 2020-2021 Disability Futures Fellow and a member of the YBCA 105. Since 2009, they have been a lead performer with disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid; since 2020 they have been on the programming committee of the Disability and Intersectionality Summit. 

Raised in rust belt central Massachusetts and shaped by T’karonto and Oakland, they are currently at work building Living Altars/ The Stacey Park Milbern Liberation Arts Center, a disabled QTBIPOC writers space and accessible writers retreat for disabled BIPOC creators. They are a haggard porch and couch witch and a very unprofessional adaptive trike rider. 

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson (he/they) is the author of SLINGSHOT (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Johnson’s writing has appeared in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, Prompt Press, Apogee, Boston Review, The Root, and The New York Times among other outlets. In 2020, Johnson received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.