Laura C. Harris Series welcomes Shanna Katz Kattari and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Denison University’s Laura C. Harris Series welcomes Shanna Katz Kattari and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha presenting the "Disability and Gender Justice" panel.

Kattari is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work and Department of Women's Studies (by courtesy). She is a board-certified sexologist, sexuality educator, and social justice advocate. Her research focuses on understanding how power, privilege and oppression systematically marginalize, exclude, and discriminate against people regarding their identities/expressions through negative attitudes, policies reinforcing oppression, oppressive actions and isolation. Her work centers on disability/ableism/microaggressions, and transgender/nonbinary identities and transphobia, using an intersectional lens.  

Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer, cultural worker and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. Piepzna-Samarasinha is the author of “Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice,” “Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home” (short-listed for the Lambda and Publishing Triangle Awards, ALA Above the Rainbow List), “Bodymap” (short listed for the Publishing Triangle Award), “Love Cake” (Lambda Literary Award winner), and “Consensual Genocide,” and co-editor of “The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities.” Her next two books, “Tonguebreaker” and “Exploring Transformative Justice: A Reader” (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon) are forthcoming in 2019. A lead artist with Sins Invalid, her writing has been widely published, with recent work in PBS Newshour, Poets.org's Poetry and the Body folio, The Deaf Poets Society, Bitch, Self, TruthOut and The Body is Not an Apology.  She is a VONA Fellow and holds a Master of Fine Arts from Mills College.