Junauda Petrus, creative activist, writer, playwright, and multi-dimensional performance artist has written three visceral and exquisite poems for Nicollet Lanterns. Minneapolis-born, West-Indian descended, and African-sourced, she describes her work as centering around Black wildness, Afro-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, spectacle and shimmer.

Petrus has received a Givens Foundation fellowship, Jerome Travel and Study grant, Many Voices Mentorship with the Playwright’s Center, and Naked Stages Residency at the Pillsbury House. With filmmaker Mychal Fisher, she presently writes and directs an experimental and poetic web series funded by a 2016 Jerome Foundation Film grant about Black teens coming of age in Minneapolis. She is the co-founder with Erin Sharkey of Free Black Dirt, an experimental arts production company.

Read the interview with this multi-faceted artist here.