Junauda Petrus Email & Phone Number

Junauda Petrus is an abolitionist, writer, filmmaker, runaway witch, soul sweetener and performance artist born on Dakota land of Trinidadian and Crucian descent. Petrus’ work employs poetics and experiences re-membered via research and ancestral dreaming.Her first book, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them, received the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award. This year she released her first children’s book, “Can We Please Give The Police Department to the Grandmother’s?” based on an abolitionist future.She is the co-founder of Free Black Dirt, an artist collective based in Minneapolis, creating space for the literary artists’ community. In her work as an aerialist she intertwined her background in black diaspora dance and explored themes of blackness reclaimed and re-imagined in the vertical space. Her work seeks to heal the legacy of violence and lynching that we associate with “Black bodies swinging”. From this she wrote and directed There Are Other Worlds, an ancestral-aerial-circus-poem-play.She has created and performed in her own experimental short film work including Love Tones, Out My Mind and Erotics of Abolition. In all her artistic forms she explores diaspora, the erotic, the speculative, ancestral magic, stories of queerness and femmehood, wildness, laughter, sweetness, spectacle and shimmer.

Listed skills include Interviews, Creative Writing, Dance, Teaching Writing, and 9 others.

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  Hamline University

  Social Justice With A Focus On African Diaspora Studies