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Treatise, Scripture, Manifesto: Reckoning With "Love Cake", Lalini Shanela Ranaraja

Audre Lorde Writing Prize

This essay was written in response to Sri Lankan-American writer and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha's poetry collection Love Cake, as part of a directed study I undertook in Spring 2021. A goal of the directed study, titled "The Empire Writes Back" was to engage with and build upon work by writers from South Asia and the diaspora, of which Piepzna-Samarasinha is a vocal member. In this essay, I explore not only the sense of connection I feel with this poet and her body of work as a result of shared experiences of otherness, trauma, and nationhood, but also …