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Image Description: Wearing a sleeveless black t-shirt with a shark graphic, a Sri Lankan, Roma and Irish nonbinary femme with tan skin, curly shoulder-length turquoise and grey hair, purple lipstick and tattooed arms, looks down and grins at the camera in front of a blooming jasmine vine.

Writing Workshop with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

  • 06/27/2021
  • 3pm CST

Event details

Burning, Rising, Waking Up: Writing Without Setting Yourself on Fire with
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

It is burning./ It is dreaming./ It is waking up– Linda Hogan “Maps” 

After more than a year of the triple pandemics of COVID-19, white supremacist/fascist violence and economoc peril, many of us have had to stay frozen or numb to endure mass trauma, grief and terror. Now, although these conditions continue, some of us are thawing, or just can’t keep our stories in any longer. What stories in you are burning to be told? What supports, magic and tools do you need to be able to tell them? 

 In this BIPOC centered workshop, with a focus on queer, trans and Two Spirit writers during pride month, we will create a space to tell our stories of what is burning and waking and yearning to be told in us, and share tools to be able to write from our traumatized, surviving, beautiful body/minds. There will be breaks; come as you are; we will read poems and write and only share with consent. Bring your own snacks.

REGISTRATION IS LIMITED. TO BE PUT ON THE WAITLIST FOR THIS WORKSHOP, PLEASE FILL OUT THIS FORM. PRIORITY WILL BE GIVEN TO BIPOC QUEER, TRANS, AND TWO SPIRIT WRITERS.

>HOW TO PARTICIPATE<<
The Zoom link will be sent out the day before + day of the workshop.

>ACCESSIBILITY<<
This workshop will be live-captioned in English. If you’d like to request an ASL interpreter, please email mizna@mizna.org by June 21.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled nonbinary femme writer, freedom dreamer, and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Roma ascent. She is the 2020 winner of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Jean Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, and is the author or co-editor of nine books, including  (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon),Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Bridge of Flowers, Bodymap, Dirty River, The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities (coedited with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani), Love Cake and Consensual Genocide. Piepzna-Samarasinha has been a lead artist for the disability justice performance collective, Sins Invalid, since 2009, co-created the community art spaces Performance/Disability/Art, Mangos With Chili, and Toronto’s Asian Arts Freedom School and is currently on the programming team for the 2021 Disability and Intersectionality Summit. They are an aging brown queer punk of color, a rust belt poet, an islander in the diaspora, a lover of other survivors and weirdo, an abolitionist and a third generation Sri Lankan feminist teacher. Raised in Worcester, MA and Toronto, they live in South Seattle, Duwamish territories. brownstargirl.org
>ABOUT THE POETRY COALITION<<
This event is part of national Poetry Coalition programming and is supported by the Academy of American Poets with funds from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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