Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha ran away from America with two backpacks and ended up in Canada, where she discovered queer anarchopunk love and revolution, yet remained haunted by the reasons she left home in the first place. This passionate and riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it reveals how a disabled queer woman of color and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the past and, as the subtitle suggests, “dreams her way home.”

INCLUSION CRITERIA

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha has identified herself as queer/bisexual. Notable is her essay “On Being a Bisexual Femme” in Femme: Feminists, Lesbians and Bad Girls.