Shayda Kafai and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha discuss "Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid"

This program is presented by the Seattle Public Library and Elliott Bay Book Company and will be (virtually) hosted by Seattle Public Library as a Zoom webinar. Registration is required and you will have the option to register for the event (free) OR register for the event and buy a copy of the book, which will be shipped via Media Mail within the Continental U.S. ONLY. International orders may be placed on the Elliott Bay website. Zoom links will be sent out via Eventbrite two days before the event. Video of this program will be closed captioned and will appear on the SPL YouTube Channel after the event.

In recent years, disability activism has come into its own as a vital and necessary means to acknowledge the power and resilience of the disabled community, and to call out ableist culture wherever it appears.

Crip Kinship explores the art-activism of Sins Invalid, a San Francisco Bay Area-based performance project, and its radical imaginings of what disabled, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming bodyminds of color can do: how they can rewrite oppression, and how they can gift us with transformational lessons for our collective survival.

Grounded in their Disability Justice framework, Crip Kinship investigates the revolutionary survival teachings that disabled, queer of color community offers to all our bodyminds. From their focus on crip beauty and sexuality to manifesting digital kinship networks and crip-centric liberated zones, Sins Invalid empowers and moves us toward generating our collective liberation from our bodyminds outward.

Shayda Kafai is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. As a queer, Mad, femme of color, she commits to enacting the many ways we can reclaim our bodyminds from intersecting systems of oppression. She lives in Pomona, California with her wife, Amy.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they) is a disabled, autistic nonbinary femme writer of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. The author or co-editor of nine books, including (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon) Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice and Dirty River, their work has won the Lambda and been shortlisted five times for the Publishing Triangle Awards. A lead artist with Sins Invalid since 2009, they are the 2020 winner of the Jeanne Cordova Prize for Lesbian and Queer Nonfiction and a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow.