Poems Not Prisons

Poems Not Prisons Presents
A Very Special One-Woman Show with
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Saturday, November 3 2007 7:30pm
The A-Space
4722 Baltimore Ave, Philadelphia PA 19143
Free- donations appreciated

www.poemsnotprisons.org
myspace.com/poemsnotprisons
poemsnotprisons@riseup.net
www.the-aspace.org
a-space@defenestrator.org

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer Sri Lankan writer, spoken word artist and cultural worker. The author of Consensual Genocide (TSAR), she has performed her work widely throughout North America, including performances at Yale University, Oberlin College, University of Southern California, Swarthmore College, Poets Against Rape, Femme 2006, The Loft, louderARTS, and the immigrant rights rallies and benefits for queer youth centers down your block. Obsessed with documenting queer/trans of color, mixed-race, Sri Lankan, high femme and survivor stories, her work has been anthologized in Homelands: Women's Journeys Across Race, Time and Place, We Don't Need Another Wave, Colonize This!, With a Rough Tongue: Femmes write porn, Without a Net, Dangerous Families, Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws, Brazen Femme, Femme, and A Girl's Guide to Taking Over the World, as well as in Colorlines and Bitch magazines.

From 2003-2007 she produced Toronto's acclaimed Browngirlworld queer/trans of color spoken word series and is one of the co-creators of Toronto's Asian Arts Freedom School, a writing and radical Asian history program for APIA youth. With Maria Cristina Rangel, aka Miss Cherry Galette, she is the co-founder of Mangos With Chili, the annual roving roadshow of queer and trans people of color artists. Newly relocated to Oakland after running away from America for a decade, she is completing her MFA in creative nonfiction at Mills College, touring her one-woman show, Grown Woman Show, and finshing her second book, Dirty River, a memoir of coming of age as a young queer brown survivor in late 90s queerpunk and people of color activism. She is a member of the Revolution Starts At Home collective, which is publishing a zine on confronting partnre abuse in activist communities. Her websites are brownstargirl.com and myspace.com/leahlakshmi.
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Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
www.brownstargirl.com
www.myspace.com/leahlakshmi
www.myspace.com/mangoswithchili