Junauda Petrus

Junauda Petrus is an abolitionist, writer, filmmaker, and performance artist of Black Trinidadian and Crucian descent, born on Dakota/Anishinaabe land (Minneapolis). Her work fuses ancestral dreaming, poetics, and radical imagination to envision Black liberation and sweetness. She is the 2025–2026 poet laureate of Minneapolis and author of The Stars and The Blackness Between Them (Coretta Scott King Honor), and Can We Please Give The Police Department to the Grandmothers?

While at the Bogliasco Center, Junauda will develop Erotics of Abolition: LOVE TEMPLES (EoA: LT), an immersive, experimental-healing space, performance and literary project that envisions alternative futures of community care, healing, and abolition. EoA: LT is a vision where Love Temples replace police precincts and serve as sanctuaries for the radical work of abolition. EoA: LT will offer pre-emptive joy, cultural creative play, political education, healing, and abolition practices of community care.