Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Lambda Literary Award winning poet and essayist and long-time disability justice advocate Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha writes passionately and personally about disability justice in her latest book of essays. Discussing subjects such as the creation of care webs, collective access, and radically accessible spaces, she also imparts her own survivor skills and wisdom based on her years of activist work, empowering the disabled - in particular, those in queer and/or BIPOC communities - and granting them the necessary tools by which they can imagine a future where no one is left behind.

Dreaming Disability Justice

Care Work

Krys C

Love in action is when we strategize to create cross-disability access spaces. When we refuse to abandon each other. When we, as disabled people, fight for the access needs of sibling crips. I've seen able-bodied organizers be confused by this. Why am I fighting so hard for fragrance free space or a ramp, if it's not something i personally need?

When disabled people get free, everybody gets free. More access makes everything more accessible for everybody. 

care work starts from a curious, open, in flux network infrastructure of solidarity, provision, mutual aid and harm reduction practices. care work is love in action, poetry enacted and realised. it is access intimacy and liberatory strategy not for the sake of 'diversity' or 'inclusion' buzzwords, but for the absolute joy of collective autonomy and freedom. 

fairuza hanun

so incredibly refreshing to hear some real fucking shit about disability, narratives that aren't sanitized for able-bodied audiences - a refusal and a provocation; a bit neurotic for my tastes but that is a) understandable and b) means nothing to the vast majority of readers. definitely recommend

eris

mira lee

A.L.L.

I think this should be on everyone's to-read list. It's a realistic and candid conversation about what accessibility really means, what work is, what it should or could be, what we value and how we take care of each as a society. 

The reality is that everyone is going to have periods of their life where they will be differently abled, yet we currently build our society in a way that assumes we will all be at our peak and able in a hyper specific way for our entire life is just not realistic and incredibly exclusionary. We will never know the extent of who has been excluded until we become more inclusive so everyone can occupy the same spaces. Doing so benefits everyone and having more voices at the table means more ideas and creative solutions to the problems we face. This book covers these ideas and more. It was a really good read.

Stephanie Ridiculous

I really appreciated this collection of thoughts, reflections, action plans, lists, and experience sharing on disability and disability justice. 

Piepzna-Samarasinha is a very conversational writer, which makes this collection a joy to approach as we learn more from an own-voices work. Additionally great was getting to listen to this read by Piepzna-Samarasinha themselves, which I always recommend when possible & double so when it's something more personal like this.

I will caution that there is a lot of swearing and frank discussion here, so if you're sensitive to that proceed intentionally. I definitely recommend this to anyone curious about what disability justice actually is, what it looks like in very practical terms, and how to begin taking stock of the way you personally interact with disability & disability justice.

Care Work Dreaming Disability Justice

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