Winner of the Lambda Literary Award, Lesbian Poetry, 2012
Honourable Mention, San Francisco Book Festival, Poetry, 2012

In Love Cake, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of colour resist and transform violence through love and desire. Refusing to forget the traumas of post 9/11 Islamophobia, and Sri Lanka's civil war, Love Cake documents the persistence of survival and beauty. It maps the complicated, luscious joy of reclaiming the body and sexuality after abuse, examines a family history of violence with compassion, and celebrates the beautiful resistance of queer people of colour in love and home-making.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they) is a mixed-blood, middle-aged nonbinary femme disabled and autistic writer, disability and transformative justice cultural and movement worker of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Galician ascent. A crip web weaver, couch and porch witch, they are the author and/or co-editor of nine books, including Beyond Survival ((with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Dirty River, and Bodymap. A Lambda Literary Award winner who has been shortlisted for the Publishing Triangle five times, they are the winner of Lambda's 2020 Jean Cordova Award "honoring a lifetime of work documenting the complexities of queer of color/femme/disabled experience" and are a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow. Raised in rustbelt central Massachusetts and shaped by T'karonto and Oakland, they currently make home in South Seattle, Duwamish territories. They are an adaptive trike rider and a triple grand water trine. Their newest book, The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, will be published in fall 2022.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's profile page

"If you haven't read any of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha's incredible feminist essays, you're missing out. Her poetry is as unflinchingly political as her non fiction, but it also touches on the more personal territory of her life as a queer disabled femme Sri Lankan artist." --Bitch Magazine

"Only Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha could concoct the secret recipe for Love Cake. One layer of escaped working class girl from Worcester, MA; one layer of long lost Tamil woman returning to her Sri Lankan roots; sweet cream of sexy queer femme on top; unexpected bite into her bittersweet love & trouble triumph healing rebellion. No one knows quite how she makes it; just that we can't get enough." --Aya de Leon, Director June Jordan's Poetry for the People, UC Berkeley

"Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Love Cake is a book I want to carry with me when I need to remember my body, to remember our ancestors, to rebuild home. Leah's poems are rebel songs and love songs that bear witness and fight back. Love Cake is as miraculous, as mean, as stunning as every queer brown girl who survives." --Qwo-Li Driskill, author of Walking with Ghosts: Poems

"Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Love Cake is a book of poems chronicling the steady kind of love, the grown-up guide to visioning yourself whole with our homemade stories on one arm and our slutty brown femme sister on the other. Love Cake is a necessary book that will heal our communities after heartbreak and push us towards creating our own dreams of liberation." --Ching-In Chen