On Sale Date: October 4, 2022
ISBN 9781551528915, 1551528916
Trade Paperback | 272 pages
This is Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s (they/them) followup to their bestselling 2018 nonfiction book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, which has sold over 30,000 copies and continues to be among our week-to week bestselling titles. Care Work has become a seminal text in disability justice circles, a growing field which asserts and uplifts the rights of the disabled (see also the well-received Netflix documentary Crip Camp, and books by other disability activists such as Alice Wong and Eli Clare among others).
· In The Future Is Disabled, Leah does a deeper dive into the issues discussed in Care Work, especially disability justice in the age of the pandemic; those who argue for Covid immunity through exposure espouse a eugenics approach to its cure that in essence treats the disabled as disposable. As in Care Work, Leah’s work can and should be viewed through a queer, racialized lens, on issues such as interdependence, care and mutual aid, disabled community building, and disabled art practice.
· There are essays that also deal with crips dealing with potentialevacuations during the 2020 wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, and with working with community to make the abolitionist/BLM protests (also 2020) accessible for all. Other essays deal with essays on disabled grief (especially during Covid), disabled homes as holy places, cripping pleasure activism, and “What We Mean/ What We Fuck Up When We Do This Thing Called Interdependence.”
· Leah’s other books from Arsenal are the memoir Dirty River (2015) and the poetry collection Tonguebreaker (2019). Leah is also the co-editor of Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (AK Press, 2020). They won a Lambda Literary Award for the poetry book Love Cake (2012).
