Description:

Join us as we welcome Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and explore our programming theme for the year "Disability Justice as Feminist Practice." Keynote will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Chicago-based organizer Joy Messinger!

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a nonbinary femme disabled writer and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Galician Romani ascent. They are the author or co-editor of nine books, including (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, they are also the 2020 Jean Cordova Award winner “honoring a lifetime of work documenting the complexities of queer experience” and are a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow. Raised in rust belt central Massachusetts, they currently make home in South Seattle, Duwamish territories. Their next book, The Future Is Disabled, is out Fall 2022.

Joy Messinger is a physically disabled and chronically ill queer femme Korean adoptee, organizer, resource mobilizer, facilitator, poet, and writer. Based on Neshnabé / Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi) land (Chicago, Illinois) for the past decade, she was born in Seoul and grew up in semi-rural Western New York. They work in social justice philanthropy, organize with their neighbors to create a world beyond policing and prisons, and are studying to be a death doula, intuitive tarot reader, and licensed funeral director. Joy also loves books, the WNBA, the Shonda Rhimes one-hour drama, noodles and dumplings of all kinds, and her cat Kimchi Lox.