Fiction / Interdisciplinary
Junauda Petrus is a creative activist, writer, playwright, and multi-dimensional performance artist who is born on Dakota land, West-Indian descended, and African-sourced. Her work centers around Black wildness, futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, spectacle and shimmer. She is the author of The Stars And The Blackness Between Them, winner of the 2020 Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award.
At the Anderson Center, Junauda is worked on her young adult novel, Black Circus. The book intertwines themes of Black creative expression as an antidote to anti-Black oppression, queerness in the 90s in Minneapolis, the whimsical & healing spectacle of circus, contrasted with the exhibitive, violent legacy of lynching. Although this book explores heavy themes, it grounds within a tender coming of age story of Zulema, a young aspiring circus artist. During her residency, Junauda lead a speculative writing workshop with AP Literature students at Red Wing High School.