Junauda Petrus is an abolitionist, writer, filmmaker, and performance artist of Black Trinidadian and Crucian descent, born on Dakota/Anishinaabe land (Minneapolis). Her work fuses ancestral dreaming, poetics, and radical imagination to envision Black liberation and sweetness. She is the 2025–2026 poet laureate of Minneapolis and author of The Stars and The Blackness Between Them (Coretta Scott King Honor), and Can We Please Give The Police Department to the Grandmothers? (Minnesota Book Award Finalist). Her interdisciplinary work includes plays, immersive performance, aerial dance, and film projects centering Black queer futures, abolition, and healing. She has created original work with the Kennedy Center, Heart of the Beast Theatre, Intermedia Arts, and Pillsbury House Theatre, and is a Jerome Fellow and two-time Jerome Travel and Study Grant recipient.

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