Junauda Petrus is a Minneapolis-born creative visionary, writer, playwright, and performance artist of Black Trinidadian and Crucian descent. Her work celebrates Black wildness, futurism, and ancestral healing, weaving poetics and storytelling with histories re-membered through dreaming and research.
Deeply inspired by her parents and ancestors who immigrated from the Caribbean, Junauda’s art reflects the magic, resilience, as well as trauma carried across generations. Her work resonates with themes of the Middle Passage, the African diaspora, and the lives of Black communities here in Minneapolis. She explores ancestral magic, queerness, and womanhood, often infusing speculative fiction and magical realism into her creations.
- Junauda has received widespread recognition, including:
- A Jerome Travel and Study Grant for research on queerness and African-inspired spiritualities in Trinidad and Tobago.
- Recipient of the Many Voices Mentorship from the Playwright’s Center to study playwriting.
- Being named City Pages’ Artist of the Year in 2016.
- Author of The Stars and the Blackness Between Them, which won the 2020 Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award.
- Minnesota Book Award Finalist in 2023 for her first children’s book, “Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers?”
Junauda Petrus embodies the creativity, diversity, and richness of Minneapolis’ cultural fabric. Her artistry reminds us of the transformative power of storytelling to connect us to the past, illuminate the present, and imagine the future.