Dirty River by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samara...

Could you talk about your process a bit, and the evolution of the work? This is the first book you’ve written in which you’ve incorporated talking about disability in a very central way. ’bodymap’ (excerpt) from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s BodymapĭEVYN MANIBO: In March, you released your newest book, Bodymap. If we both have written maps to the stars If you’re not, pick up a copy of Bodymap and cry a little maybe cry a lot. If you’re in the Bay, definitely check out that performance. Mangos With Chili’s final National Queer Arts Festival showcase happens June 25 at the African American Art and Culture Complex in San Francisco. On the agenda: the release of her latest poetry collection, Bodymap, and winding down queer and trans people of color cabaret group Mangos With Chili after nine years of work. Now, Leah’s moving into a transitional stage of her career and I had the privilege of talking with her about what’s new and what’s next. She’s a performer, writer, organizer, and one of many “justice squad” queens.

Her poetry and performances explore everything from queer love and desire to healing, dis/ability, and survival. If you were ever a lost, traveling kid, or just lost, or had to come to terms with a million intersecting identities in a cookie cutter world, this book is for you.If you know anything about Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, you probably know she’s a tough femme whose work spans a wide and ever-growing range of conversations, topics, feelings, and experiences. We need more coming-of-age stories like this one for a generation that has finally grown up enough to look back on our past adventures and trials and start to put them all in perspective. Her memoir is as intense and disjointed as her experience, 'dreaming her way home' through stories of immigration court, queer South Asian dance nights, navigating a disability and processing the traumas of abuse, navigating the dirty river of the past and figuring out her own identity and her own life. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha did just that she left a troubled family life in the US and found a sort of grubby, queer anarchopunk redemption in Canada. Looking back at being a teenager the 1990s, it was a heady time of feeling like you could hit the road with a backpack and break all the rules and carve out your own life in a new city on your own terms in a subculture that wasn't going to make your life easy but would at least accept you as you were and support you in making all your own mistakes.

Dirty River by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samara...