Archives: Speakers
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Jean Prokott
Jean Prokott is the poet laureate of Rochester, Minnesota and a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She is the author of the poetry collection The Second Longest Day of the Year, which won the Howling Bird Press Book Prize and was published with Howling Bird Press in November 2021, and of the chapbook The Birthday Effect (Black Sunflowers 2021). She is a…
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Heid E. Erdrich
Heid E. Erdrich is a curator and teacher. Erdrich edited the anthology New Poets of Native Nations and co-edited the newly published Boundless: Abundance in Native American Art and Literature. She served as the inaugural Minneapolis Poet Laureate supported by an Academy of American Poets award. Erdrich held the 2025 James Welch Distinguished Visiting position at University…
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Junauda Petrus
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,…
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In The Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater
Start with Water, flour, newspaper, paint. Add a large measure of IMAGINATION and a dollop of ARTISTRY to make STORIES about our world come ALIVE through PUPPETS. This is in the Heart of the Beast’s nearly 50-year-old puppet recipe. Since 1973, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre has helped to create…
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Autumn Brown
Autumn Brown is an artist, facilitator, mother, and theologian. The front woman of the eponymously named soul-pop band, AUTUMN, she is a queer, mixed-race Black woman, a gifted facilitator and orator, and a freedom worker who grounds her approach to building movements for liberation in her belief in the innate capacity for healing that emanates…
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adrienne maree brown
adrienne maree brown (she/they) is growing a garden of healing ideas. Informed by decades of movement facilitation, somatics, science fiction scholarship and doula work, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Loving Correction as ideas and practices for transformation. adrienne is the NYT-bestselling author/editor of several published texts, a ritual singer-songwriter, co-generator of the Lineages of…
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Hothouse
Hothouse is a multi-purpose studio space in Minneapolis featuring drop-in dance, arts and fitness classes for adults. Whether you’re already involved in the local arts scene, an aspiring dance professional looking to bolster your training, or just a human who loves to move, Hothouse offers classes that celebrate the bliss of movement, and embrace you…
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Jothsna Harris
Jothsna is the founder of Change Narrative, which exists to build capacity in the climate justice movement through the power of our stories. Through a coaching practice, Jothsna works with front-line leaders, legislators, artists, organizations, and community groups to craft climate narratives to advocate for solutions. With over a decade of experience, Jothsna has designed…
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Heidi Roop
Dr. Heidi Roop is a national expert in climate science and adaptation. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, where she directs the Climate Adaptation Partnership – a nation-leading climate research and Extension program. Roop’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the effective integration of climate information in decision-making. Her research has taken her…
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The Rock and Roll Playhouse
The Rock and Roll Playhouse, a family concert series hosted at historic music venues across the country, allows kids to “move, play and sing while listening to works from the classic-rock canon” (NY Times). Performing songs created by the most iconic musicians in rock history, The Rock and Roll Playhouse band offers its core audience…