Conference Presenter

Junauda Petrus is a soul sweetener, cosmic bag lady and a runaway witch. She is an abolitionist, writer, playwright, filmmaker and performance artist born on Dakota land, Trinidadian and Cruzan descended, and African-originated. In all her artistic forms she explores diaspora, the erotic, the speculative, ancestral magic, stories of queerness and femmehood, wildness, laughter, sweetness, spectacle and shimmer.  She received a Jerome Grant in literature to research queerness and African-inspired spiritualities in Trinidad and Tobago for her fiction. Her first book, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them, received the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award.  She has recently released her first children’s book, “Can We Please Give The Police Department to the Grandmother’s?” based on her abolitionist love poem.