Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled nonbinary femme writer, space creator, community archivist, performer, freedom dreamer, and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Roma ascent. Piepzna-Samarasinha is the Lambda Award winning author or co-editor of nine books, including Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Bridge of Flowers, Bodymap, Dirty River, The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities (coedited with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani), Love Cake, and Consensual Genocide.

A lead artist with the disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid since 2009, they are on the organizing team for the Disability and Intersectionality Summit and are a co-founder of the Crip Rebel Alliance, a group of Black and brown disabled abolitionists in Seattle; Mangos with Chili; Asian Arts Freedom School; and Performance/Disability/Art Collective with Syrus Marcus Ware. Piepzna-Samarasinha is the 2020 winner of the Lambda Literary Foundation's Jean Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, honoring a life's work of being a “writer committed to nonfiction work that captures the depth and complexity of lesbian/queer life, culture, and/or history.”