LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA is a queer disabled femme writer, organizer, performance artist and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. They are the author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice , Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home (short-listed for the Lambda and Publishing Triangle Awards, ALA Above the Rainbow List), Bodymap (short listed for the Publishing Triangle Award), Love Cake (Lambda Literary Award winner), and Consensual Genocide, and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. Their next two books, Tonguebreaker and Exploring Transformative Justice: A Reader (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon) are forthcoming in 2019. A lead artist with Sins Invalid, her writing has been widely published, with recent work in PBS Newshour, Poets.org's Poetry and the Body folio, The Deaf Poets Society, Bitch, Self, TruthOut and The Body is Not an Apology. She is a VONA Fellow and holds an MFA from Mills College. She is also a rust belt poet, a Sri Lankan with a white mom, a femme over 40, a grassroots intellectual, a survivor who is hard to kill.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is part of a series of keynote speakers Spectrum Center is hosting on campus covering radical queer advocacy and activism work in collaboration with several departments and student organizations at University of Michigan.
This program is presented by the U-M Spectrum Center, and co-sponsored by Trotter Multicultural Center, Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), Center for Campus Involvement (CCI), University Housing Diversity and Inclusion, Institute for the Humanities, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Michigan Community Scholars Program, LSA Residential College, School of Social Work DEI, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.