About the speakers:
Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a nonbinary femme autistic disabled writer, space creator, and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish, and Galician/Roma ascent. They are the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs; Beyond Survival (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon); Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement; Tonguebreaker; Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice; and Bodymap.
A Lambda Award winner who has been shortlisted for the Publishing Triangle five times, she is winner of Lambda’s 2020 Jeanne Córdova Award “honoring a lifetime of work documenting the complexities of queer of color/femme/disabled experience” and a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow. Since 2009, they have been a lead performer with disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid. Raised in rust belt central Massachusetts and shaped by T’karonto and Oakland, they are currently at work building Living Altars/The Stacey Park Milbern Liberation Arts Center, a home for disabled QTBIPOC writers. They are a hot, haggard porch and couch witch and a very unprofessional adaptive trike rider. Read more info here.
Elsa Sjunneson is a Deafblind author and editor living in Seattle, Washington. Her fiction and nonfiction writing has been praised as “eloquence and activism in lockstep” and has been published in dozens of venues around the world. She has been a Hugo Award finalist seven times, and has won Hugo, Aurora, and BFA awards for her editorial work. When she isn’t writing, Sjunneson works to dismantle structural ableism and rebuild community support for disabled people everywhere. Her work includes her debut memoir Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism, her Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla novel Sword of the White Horse, and her episode for Radiolab, “The Helen Keller Exorcism.” Read more info here.
About Alice Wong: Alice is the editor of Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, an anthology of essays by disabled people and Disability Visibility: 17 First-Person Stories for Today an adapted version for young adults. Her debut memoir, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life will be available on September 6, 2022, from Vintage Books.
Year of the Tiger is a groundbreaking memoir that offers a glimpse into an activist’s journey to finding and cultivating community, as well as the continued fight for disability justice. In Chinese culture, the tiger is deeply revered for its confidence, passion, ambition, and ferocity. That same fighting spirit resides in Alice Wong.
Drawing on a collection of original essays, previously published work, conversations, graphics, photos, commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists, and more, Alice uses her unique talent to share an impressionistic scrapbook of her life as an Asian American disabled activist, community organizer, media maker, and dreamer.
From her love of food and pop culture to her unwavering commitment to dismantling systemic ableism, Alice shares her thoughts on creativity, access, power, care, the pandemic, mortality, and the future. As a self-described disabled oracle, Alice traces her origins, tells her story, and creates a space for disabled people to be in conversation with one another and the world.
You can find Wong on Twitter: @SFdirewolf.