Junauda Petrus is an abolitionist, writer, filmmaker, runaway witch, soul sweetener, and performance artist of Black Trinidadian and Crucian descent, born on Dakota/Anishinaabe homeland (Minneapolis). Her work invokes poetics and experiences re-membered through research, play, and ancestral dreaming to imagine liberated futures shaped by sweetness, healing, and the sacred. Her debut novel, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them, received the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award. Her children’s book, Can We Please Give The Police Department to the Grandmothers? was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2023. She is the 2025–2026 poet laureate of Minneapolis and a recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. She wrote, directed, and co-produced the poetic circus-play There Are Other Worlds. In 2021, she served as librettist for The Cartography Project at the Kennedy Center, writing about Minneapolis and the ancestor George Floyd. As a filmmaker, she directed Sweetness of Wild, a poetic episodic web series and Erotics of Abolition, which she also performed in centering the embodied erotic for Black liberation. Petrus’ work is steeped in abolitionist dreaming, ancestral listening, and Black queer feminist poetics.