Climate for All: Disability Rights & the Environment

Jen Deerinwater, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Syrus Marcus Ware and Petra Kuppers

Climate for All: Disability Rights & the Environment

Jen Deerinwater, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Syrus Marcus Ware and Petra Kuppers

7:30pm

Thursday, October 21

To celebrate Syrus Marcus Ware’s new event in The New Embassy series, taking place on April 26 at 7pm ET, this event will be re-released for 72 hours starting on April 21, 2022.

Authors and experts in candid, live conversation reflect on the topics that matter most during this unprecedented time. Tune in each day of the Festival to hear new speakers in critical conversation about the topics shaping today’s world. As activists and communities around the world work to address the climate crisis, its intersection with disability rights and policies is a vital consideration. This engaging conversation brings together published panelists Jen Deerinwater, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Syrus Marcus Ware and Petra Kuppers to discuss the overlap between climate activism and improving inequities in disability worldmaking.

ASL interpreters and captioning was provided for this event. For questions regarding accessibility, please contact support@festivalofauthors.ca or call 416-973-4760. This event is presented in partnership with the CoMotion Festival.

Proudly supported by
Harriet Lewis and Eldon Bennett
Andrew and Valerie Pringle

Panel Discussion

To celebrate Syrus Marcus Ware’s new event in The New Embassy series, taking place on April 26 at 7pm ET, this event will be re-released for 72 hours starting on April 21, 2022.

Authors and experts in candid, live conversation reflect on the topics that matter most during this unprecedented time. Tune in each day of the Festival to hear new speakers in critical conversation about the topics shaping today’s world. As activists and communities around the world work to address the climate crisis, its intersection with disability rights and policies is a vital consideration. This engaging conversation brings together published panelists Jen Deerinwater, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Syrus Marcus Ware and Petra Kuppers to discuss the overlap between climate activism and improving inequities in disability worldmaking.

ASL interpreters and captioning was provided for this event. For questions regarding accessibility, please contact support@festivalofauthors.ca or call 416-973-4760. This event is presented in partnership with the CoMotion Festival.

Proudly supported by
Harriet Lewis and Eldon Bennett
Andrew and Valerie Pringle

Panel Discussion

Featured Authors

Jen Deerinwater
Jen Deerinwater is an award-winning journalist and organizer who covers the myriad of issues hir communities face with an intersectional lens. Jen is the founding executive director of Crushing Colonialism, a Disability Futures fellow and a contributor to Truthout. Hir work has been featured in a wide range of publications, including the anthology Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty First Century. Jen is hard at work on two books, Sacred and Subversive: Queer Perspectives on the Future of Religious and Spiritual Communities and Web of Extraction: The Appalachian Fracking Boom and its assault on life.

Read more about Jen Deerinwater

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a non-binary femme disabled writer of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Galician Romani ascent. They are the author or co-editor of nine books, including (with Ejeris Dixon) Beyond Survival, Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice and Bodymap. A Lambda Award winner who has been shortlisted for the Publishing Triangle five times, they are the 2020 Jean Cordova Award winner “honoring a lifetime of work documenting the complexities of queer experience” and are a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow. Raised in rustbelt central Massachusetts and shaped by T'karonto, they currently make home in South Seattle, Duwamish territory.

Read more about Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Syrus Marcus Ware
Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier scholar, visual artist, activist, curator and educator. Using painting, installation and performance, Syrus explores social justice frameworks and black activist culture. His work has been shown widely across Canada in solo and group shows, and his performance works have been included in local and international festivals. Author of picture book Abolition is Love (Triangle Square, 2023), and illustrator of picture book I Promise (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019), Syrus holds a PhD from York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, and is Assistant Professor at the School of the Arts at McMaster University.

Read more about Syrus Marcus Ware

Petra Kuppers
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a wheelchair user and a community performance artist. Petra grew up in Germany and grounds herself in disability culture methods. Her third performance poetry collection, Gut Botany, was named one of the top ten US poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library. She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio on Three Fires Confederacy land in Michigan. Her next academic book is Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters, University of Minnesota Press, January 2022.

Read more about Petra Kuppers

7:30pm

Thursday, October 21

What to read

Gut Botany by , Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by , Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada by ,
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