Care Work Dreaming Disability Justice

Finalist, Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

In their new, long-awaited collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all. Leah writes passionately and personally about creating spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of color, and creative "collective access" — access not as a chore but as a collective responsibility and pleasure — in our communities and political movements. Bringing their survival skills and knowledge from years of cultural and activist work, Piepzna-Samarasinha explores everything from the economics of queer femme emotional labor, to suicide in queer and trans communities, to the nitty-gritty of touring as a sick and disabled queer artist of color.

Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a toolkit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.

"Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha has written a brave and brilliant book that captures the messy gestation and wildly liberating vision of disability justice. With passionate integrity, she tells the collective story of a movement that transforms the idea of care into a force capable of unraveling all the braided injustices of our lives." Aurora Levins Morales, author of Medicine Stories and Kindling: Writings On the Body

"Page after page, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha documents the necessity, power, and sheer brilliance of disability justice. Be prepared for her words, stories, and political thinking to shake up what you know about care and access, revolutionary dreaming, and present-day resilience." Eli Clare, author of Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile

"An instant classic, Care Work is equal parts on-the-ground dispatch from the disability justice movement and practical field guide to liberatory access. Rather than something to be begrudgingly tacked on, accessibility, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha shows us, might be joyous and collective." Smithsonian Magazine

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer and performer of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. Her most recent titles are the nonfiction book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018) and the poetry book Tonguebreaker (2019). Her memoir Dirty River was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Publishing Triangle Award (Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction). She is also author of the poetry books Bodymap and Love Cake (Lambda Literary Award winner) and Consensual Genocide, and coeditor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. She is the cofounder of Mangos With Chili, North America's touring queer and trans people of colorcabaret, and is a lead artist with the disability justice incubator Sins Invalid.