Wednesday, June 22, 2022 | 6 PM ET – 8 PM ET
Online | 1 Session | APPLICATIONS CLOSED
**This is a free workshop exclusively for Sick, Disabled, Deaf, and Neurodivergent 2SQTBIPOC (Two-Spirit, Queer, Trans, and Black, Indigenous, People of Color) folx. If you do not identify as Sick, Disabled, and Neurodivergent 2SQTBIPOC, we ask that you do not apply.**
**Students will be chosen by lottery. Deadline to apply is 5 PM ET on Monday, June 13, 2022.*
Disabled QTBIPOC writing space is rare and precious– but it shouldn’t be.
In this two hour workshop by and for sick/disabled/Deaf/neurodivergent QTBIPOC writers of all experience levels, we will create space to map and write the queer BIPOC disabled stories we are most hungering to tell.
We will read and witness poetry written by brilliant disabled queer, trans and Two Spirit BIPOC writers and map our lineages and the legacies we want to create as disabled QTBIPOC writers. Participants will leave with a packet of resources and writers to check out.
//NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY//
Live CART captions are provided. ASL interpretation will be provided by our friends at Pro Bono ASL. For questions and access needs, please contact tle@aaww.org.
This workshop is funded by The Poetry Coalition, a national alliance that curates poetry programming under a uniting theme every year. This workshop is part of a series of programs across organizations under the theme “The future lives in our bodies: Poetry & Disability Justice,” borrowing a line from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s poem “Femme Futures.”
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they) is a nonbinary femme disabled writer, performance artist 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 The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, (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,” and are a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow. Since 2009, they have been a lead performer with disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid. They are on the programming committee of the Disability and Intersectionality Summit and co-founded the performance collectives Mangos With Chili and Performance/Disability/Art. Raised in rust belt central Massachusetts and shaped by T’karonto and Oakland, they are currently at work building Cripple Creek Farm, a disability justice homespace and accessible retreat for disabled BIPOC creators. They are a haggard porch and couch witch and a very unprofessional adaptive trike rider. You can find them at brownstargirl.org.