Surviving As Choose Your Own Adventure Novel: A Writing Workshop for Queer and Trans People Of Color with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Date: Saturday, February 20, 2016
Time: 1-4pm
Location: FLUXX, 690 East 19th street Suite 130
Cost: Sliding Scale $25-100
Scholarships available (email for info: casakeepers@casalibre.org)
Please register and pay through Paypal:

sliding scale

Option 1 $25.00 USD Option 2 $50.00 USD Option 3 $75.00 USD Option 4 $100.00 USD

How do you write about the hardest and craziest shit you've survived when it's the biggest secrets you're not supposed to tell? Come create sacred space to share our queer Black and Brown stories of survival in this writing workshop. Using writing guidelines drawn from June Jordan's Poetry for the People and looking at amazing writing by queer and trans/ disabled/ people of color / broke/ sex working survivor writers, we will write our own roadmaps to survival and document the crazyamazing stories that only we have lived and can tell, while learning and co-creating somatic (body based)  tools to make this work easier.  Bring some items for the writing altar. Snacks, paper and water provided.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer, performance artist and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent.  The author of the Lambda Award-winning Love Cake, Dirty River,  Bodymap and Consensual Genocide and co-editor with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities, her writings on femme of color and Sri Lankan identities, survivorhood, and healing, disability and transformative justice have appeared in the anthologies Octavia's Brood, Dear Sister, Letters Lived, Undoing Border Imperialism, Stay Solid, Persistence: Still Butch and Femme, Yes Means Yes, Visible: A Femmethology, Homelands, Colonize This, We Don’t Need Another Wave, Bitchfest, Without a Net, Dangerous Families, Brazen Femme, Femme and A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over The World. She is the co-founder of Mangos With Chili, North America's touring queer and trans people of color cabaret, a lead artist with the disability justice incubator Sins Invalid and co-founder of Toronto's Asian Arts Freedom School. In 2010 she was named one of the Feminist Press' 40 Feminists Under 40 Shaping the Future, and she is a 2013 Autostraddle Hot 105 member.  She lives between Toronto, unceded Three Fires Confederacy Territories and Seattle, unceded Duwamish territories, with the love of her life, a wolfdog, and her friend family.