Junauda Petrus

Junauda Petrus is a writer, soul sweetener, runaway witch, filmmaker, and performance artist of Black-Caribbean descent—born and working on unceded Dakota land in Minneapolis. Junauda employs poetics and the erotic, and experiences the remembered via ancestral dreaming within her writing. She’s written for the stage, including the aerial-poetic-play There Are Other Worlds in 2015. From 2015-2017, she worked with the Heart of the Beast’s Theatre’s May Day parade where she engaged the community in a social justice themed puppet parade. In 2017, she wrote and directed Sweetness of Wild, an experimental, episodic film project inspired by queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, and liberation in Minneapolis. Her writing can be found in several anthologies, including Queer Voices, How I Resist, Pleasure Activism and the forthcoming Tasting Light: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Rewire Your Perceptions. Junauda's first young adult novel The Stars and The Blackness Between Them received a Coretta Scott King Award in 2020. She is a Jerome 2021-2022 artist fellow in literature and the co-founder of Free Black Dirt with Erin Sharkey, an experimental, Black arts collective. Junauda is currently writing her second YA novel Black Circus and working on adapting her first book into a film. 

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