Junauda Petras-Nasah

Junauda Petrus-Nasa is an American author, filmmaker, performance artist, and "pleasure activist". Her work centers on Black wildness, queerness, Afrofuturism, ancestral healing, and liberation. Her debut young adult novel, “The Stars and the Blackness Between Them’ (2019), a story of two queer Black teenage girls, won the 2020 Coretta Scott King Honor Award and was a Minnesota Book Award finalist.

Her children’s book, “Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers?’ (2023) stems from a 2015 poem advocating for community-based justice. Petrus co-founded Free Black Dirt, an experimental arts collective, and has written plays like “There Are Other Worlds” (2015) and “Queen’ (2016). She was named Minneapolis Poet Laureate for 2025–2026.

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