Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha follows up their incredible book Care Work with The Future Is Disabled . Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about the last two years of surviving COVID-19 as a disabled femme of color in an ableist world that isn’t interested in protecting disabled folks. They also discuss mutual aid and disabled joy in the face of isolation and discrimination.

The pandemic has been incredibly difficult for disabled people who have been asked to “take one for the team” by wider society. Piepzna-Samarasinha writes encouragement to disabled folks, relishing in our community’s creativity in our fight for survival. They also mourn those lost in the pandemic and the care crisis so many of us still face.

Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha is a poet and essayist whose most recent book, the memoir Dirty River , was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. She is also a long-time member of the disability justice movement, which advocates for the rights of the disabled. In her latest book of essays, Leah writes passionately and personally about disability justice, on subject such as the creation of care webs, collective access, and radically accessible spaces. She also imparts her own survivor skills and wisdom based on her years of activist work, empowering the disabled--in particular, those in queer and/or BIPOC communities--and granting them the necessary tools by which they can imagine a future where no one is left behind.

Presently, disability justice and emotional/care work are buzzwords on many people's lips, and the disabled and sick are discovering new ways to build power within themselves and each other; at the same time, those powers remain at risk in this fragile political climate in which we find ourselves. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.

A sly, sentimental, and wickedly funny memoir about growing up at the local fair. The PNE (Pacific National Exhibition) is a Vancouver tradition, an annual fair started in 1910 that is famous for its farm animals, dog trick shows, and amusement park highlighted by Canada’s oldest wooden roller coaster still in existence. In 1980, when Nick Marino was twelve years old, he started working at the PNE and quickly learned that there was more to the fair than winning stuffed animals and eating mini donuts. He had to contend with belligerent bosses, unhinged carnies, and teenage hustlers. In this funny, charming memoir of fair life, Marino revisits the “wild west” of the city’s East Side, home to the PNE, sharing stories from his six summers working at the fair, where arcade bouncers went on midnight roller coaster rides, riots broke out at concerts, and local kids helped themselves to everything. With beguiling and at times poignant humor, he pulls back the curtain on the culture of carnivals and fairs, an unpredictable and eternally young world of players, scammers, and dreamers. East Side Story is the latest addition to the Robin’s Egg Books series, which features some of the freshest, smartest, and above all, funniest writing on a variety of culturally relevant subjects. Titles in the imprint are curated and edited by comedian, playwright, and author Charles Demers.

What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith?
In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author's characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as adrienne maree brown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse.

Winner, Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers (Writers' Trust of Canada) and the Indigenous Voices Award; finalist, Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature
In her powerful debut collection of poetry, Arielle Twist unravels the complexities of human relationships after death and metamorphosis. In these spare yet powerful poems, she explores, with both rage and tenderness, the parameters of grief, trauma, displacement, and identity. Weaving together a past made murky by uncertainty and a present which exists in multitudes, Arielle Twist poetically navigates through what it means to be an Indigenous trans woman, discovering the possibilities of a hopeful future and a transcendent, beautiful path to regaining softness.
Awards
Short-listed, Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature 2020
Winner, Indigenous Voices Award 2020
Winner, Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers 2020
Reviews
Arielle Twist is an expansive force of holy radiant power and illuminating fury. Disintegrate/Dissociate follows in the literary footsteps of legendary trans femme writers, but Twist carves a new path for herself. Rooted in a fierce Nehiyaw love, the book is an uncompromising articulation of Indigenous sovereignty, trans girl beauty, and radical sex. In Arielle's writing, the ancestors sing loudly and without shame, creating new worlds and decolonial possibilities for everyone who witnesses Twist's brilliance. -Gwen Benaway, author of Holy Wild and Passage
A dazzling debut that is one of the most exciting developments in the literary queer poetic tradition. Combining deft eloquence with fierce emotional intensity, these poems form a bridge between past and present, pain and pleasure, ancestral love and romantic love. Twist's voice is urgent, sexy, and deeply intelligent. To read this book is to dive deep into an exploration of the ways in which the body is marked by time and place -- by sexuality, violence, colonization, kinship, and hope. Long after you turn the final page, you will still hear these poems singing somewhere inside your bones. -Kai Cheng Thom, author of a place called No Homeland and Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars
Arielle Twist's Disintegrate/Dissociate is a miraculous debut of poetry that enacts exactly what it summons into the world. I am reminded here that we cannot, and should not, remove the body from story -- we must witness what we break and reciprocate wholly to what we must rebuild. This book is majesty, it is unabashedly honest, heart rupturing so, but also wondrous in its medicine-weaving. From floorboards filled with flora to a world destroyed because the speaker can will it so, from the waving Cree prairie through to a Mi'kmaq oceanic, Twist teaches us that 'if we must survive [then] we must write' and emerges a prominent new otâcimow in Indigenous literature. -Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed and full-metal indigiqueer
Arielle Twist's visceral poetry is built and rebuilt through breaking, demonstrating the vitality of destruction. This sharp, absorbing debut collection will break you and then rebirth you. -Vivek Shraya, author of I'm Afraid of Men and even this page is white
'I will sing with no voice, no language, no song, can you hear it?' Arielle Twist's poetry is striking, visceral, honest. Reading her work is like taking a ginger shot: painful, but ultimately you're better for it. With few words, she conveys so much about the legacies of colonization, the terror of transmisogyny, and the colossal force of them both. Her candour is both urgent and compelling, confrontational and compassionate, world-making with its insistence on another way to live. In a political moment hell-bent on erasing Indigenous trans voices, Twist's Disintegrate/Dissociate is here to stay. -Alok Vaid-Menon, author of Femme in Public

When Lily was eleven years old, her mother, Swee Hua, walked away from the family, never to be seen or heard from again. Now, as a new mother herself, Lily becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Swee Hua. She recalls the spring of 1987, growing up in a small British Columbia mining town where there were only a handful of Asian families; Lily’s previously stateless father wanted them to blend seamlessly into Canadian life, while her mother, alienated and isolated, longed to return to Asia. Years later, still affected by Swee Hua’s disappearance, Lily’s family is nonetheless stubbornly silent to her questioning. But eventually, an old family friend provides a clue that sends Lily to Southeast Asia to find out the truth.
Winner of the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, Dandelion is a beautifully written and affecting novel about motherhood, family secrets, migration, isolation, and mental illness. With clarity and care, it delves into the many ways we define home, identity, and above all, belonging.

Over the past ten years, we have witnessed the rise of queer and trans communities that have defied and challenged those who have historically opposed them. Through bold, symbolic imagery and surrealist, overlapping landscapes, queer illustrator and curator Syan Rose shines a light on the faces and voices of these diverse, amorphous, messy, real and imagined queer and trans communities.

In their own words, queer and trans organizers, artists, healers, comrades, and leaders speak honestly and authentically about their own experiences with power, love, pain, and magic to create a textured and nuanced portrait of queer and trans realities in America. The many themes include Black femme mental health, Pacific Islander authorship, fat queer performance art, disability and healthcare practice, sex worker activism, and much more. Accompanying the narratives are Rose's startling and sinuous images that brings these leaders' words to visual life.

Our Work Is Everywhere is a graphic nonfiction book that underscores the brilliance and passion of queer and trans resistance.

Includes a foreword by Lambda Literary Award-winning author and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.