Recording of Conversation with Alice Wong and Leah Piepzna Samarasinha now live!

On August 20th, DJNO hosted Alice Wong and Leah Piepzna Samarasinha to discuss Alice's new book, Disability Visibility: 1st Person Stories from the 21st Century!

Ruby and Layla, two youth from the Disability Justice Network of Ontario (DJNO) facilitated an online conversation with Alice Wong and Leah Piepzna Samarasinha to talk about Alice's new book, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the 21st Century. This conversation took place on Zoom, was about an hour. The audience had the chance to ask questions at the end of the facilitated discussion.

Featured Guests:

Alice Wong:

(Image description: Photo of an Asian American woman in a power chair. She is wearing an orange-red jacket and black pants. She is wearing a mask over her nose attached to a gray tube and bright red lip color. Her hands are resting over her joystick. Photo credit: Eddie Hernandez Photography)

Alice Wong (she/her) is a disabled activist, media maker, and consultant. She is the Founder and Director of the Disability Visibility Project® (DVP), an online community dedicated to creating, sharing and amplifying disability media and culture created in 2014. Currently, Alice is the Editor of Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century, an anthology of essays by disabled people, available now (June 30, 2020) by Vintage Books.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha:

(Image description: Photo of a brown femme smiling toothily at the camera. She is wearing a black muscle tee with an image of a shark in water and a ship in the background under purple storm clouds. She is wearing fuschia lipstick, green shimmery eye shadow, and has a nose piercing. Her hair is dyed green and pushed to the left. She's standing in front of a leafy green bush with white flower blossoms.) Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha was born in Sri Lanka, raised in the United States, and now resides in Toronto, Ontario. Her ethnic heritage is Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma. In addition to writing, teaching and cultural work, she is a spoken-word artist who has performed throughout Canada and the United States. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. In the fall of 2018, Piepzna-Samarasinha published a collection of essays entitled Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. She is the 2020 winner of the Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction from the Lambda Literary organization.