Virtual Event: THE FUTURE IS DISABLED by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

About this event

Join All She Wrote Books and Disability & Intersectionality Summit (DIS) for a virtual event celebrating the release of The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. For this event, Leah will be joined by Sandy Ho, the founder of the Disability & Intersectionality Summit (DIS).

This event will be hosted on Zoom Webinar with ASL and CART provided. If you need additional access, email us at info@allshewrotebooks.com. 

In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled―and what if that's not a bad thing? And 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 Building on the work of her game changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other―and the rest of the world―alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy.

Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honor songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future.

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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.

Sandy Ho was born in the year of the tiger and is guided by the light of the closest disco ball. Sandy is the founder of the Disability & Intersectionality Summit. Her essay “Canfei to Canji: The Freedom of Being Loud” is included in Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century edited by Alice Wong. She produced the discussion guide for Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life by Alice Wong (September 2022). In 2022 Sandy received the Disability Futures Fellowship. Currently she is the director of the Disability Inclusion Fund at Borealis Philanthropy. Sandy spends her time reading, cheering for the Red Sox, and daydreaming while drinking tea. She identifies as a queer disabled Asian American woman.

Image Description: A light green colored square banner. The square banner features a small sized cover image for THE FUTURE IS DISABLED on the left side with two photographs of the author and their conversation partner above it: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha & Sandy Ho. The text reads: “All She Wrote Books presents, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in conversation with Sandy Ho, founder and co-organizer of the Disability & Intersectionality Summit, Thursday, October 6 at 7 p.m. EST via Zoom."