Junauda Petrus
“Art is a tenderizer for experiences. People don’t want to look at shit that’s hard, or that makes them feel vulnerable, but art can allow you to be part of a narrative that doesn’t feel threatening, but humanizing.”
Junauda Petrus is a creative activist, writer, playwright, and multi-dimensional performance artist. Her debut novel The Stars And The Blackness Between Them (2020) was awarded the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award. She is also the author of the children’s book Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers (2023), a joyous vision of community-based safety and mutual aid inspired by her viral poem of the same name.
In her performance work as an aerial acrobat of the corde lisse (a hanging smooth rope), Junauda has intertwined her background in West African and Afro-Caribbean Dance and explored themes of Blackness, queerness and wildness reclaimed and re-imagined in the vertical space. From 2015-2017, Junauda was lead artist with the Heart of the Beast Theatre’s May Day Parade, where she engaged the community in building and walking in a social justice-themed puppet parade.
Junauda’s stories and essays have been featured in anthologies including Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown, Body Talk, How I Resist and most recently Tasting Light, a speculative fiction collection. She is the co-founder with Erin Sharkey of Free Black Dirt, an experimental artist collective based in Minneapolis, creating original performance and supporting the emerging literary artists’ community.
