Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer Sri Lankan writer, spoken word artist and cultural worker whose life’s work is telling queer of color, radical South Asian, high femme and survivor stories. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1975, to a white working class mom and a Sri Lankan father, she came of age within riot grrl, queerpunk and young woman of color activism, only to run away from America in 1996 to live in Toronto for a decade.
The author of Consensual Genocide (TSAR Press, 2006), she has performed her work widely throughout North America, including performances at Yale University, Oberlin College, University of Southern California, Swarthmore College, Poets Against Rape, Femme 2006, The Loft, louderARTS, and the immigrant rights rallies and benefits for queer youth centers down your block. Her writing has been widely anthologized in the young queer and feminist of color press, including work in the anthologies Homelands: Women's Journeys Across Race, Time and Place, We Don't Need Another Wave, Colonize This!, With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn, Without a Net, Dangerous Families, Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws, Brazen Femme, Femme, and A Girl's Guide to Taking Over the World. Her writing has appeared in Bitch, Colorlines, Make/Shift, Fuse, Fireweed, Mizna, Thirdforce, Herizons, Xtra Toronto, NOW and Lodestar Quarterly.
From 2003 to 2007 she produced Toronto's acclaimed Browngirlworld queer and trans of color spoken word series. In 2005 she co-founded Toronto's Asian Arts Freedom School, Toronto’s only writing and radical Asian history program for APIA youth. For seven years, she taught writing to queer, trans and Two Spirit youth in Toronto through Supporting Our Youth’s Pink Ink program and won the 2004 City of Toronto Community Service to Youth Award.
With Maria Cristina Rangel, a.k.a. Miss Cherry Galette, in 2006 she co-founded Mangos With Chili, the annual roving queer and trans of color performance roadshow of “sweets, sweat, dreams and nightmares,†bringing 9 queer and trans people of color artists to 8 cities in ten days with no core funding. Their 2008 Queer Borderlands tour will take Mangos through Aztlan, from Oakland to Juarez to Austin.
Her one-woman show, Grown Woman Show, an exploration of long-term incest survivor identity, queer of color love, family and heartbreak and the possibilities for healing and reconciliation, had a successful four-day run in Toronto and is currently touring North America, including at the 2008 National Queer Arts Festival.
She is currently completing her MFA at Mills College and finishing her second book, Dirty River, a memoir of coming of age and running away from America as a young queer brown survivor girl in 1990s queerpunk and people of color activism.
Leah is a co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home, a zine about confronting partner abuse in activist communities, and a co-chair of the 2008 Asian Pacific Islander Spoken Word Summit. Her website is brownstargirl.com
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