Junauda Petrus + Erin Sharkey are FREE BLACK DIRT
Junauda Petrus is a creative activist, writer, playwright, and multi-dimensional performance artist who is Minneapolis-born, West-Indian descended, and African-sourced. Her work centers around Black wildness, Afro-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, spectacle and shimmer. She has received a Givens Foundation fellowship, Jerome Travel and Study grant, Many Voices Mentorship with the Playwright’s Center, Naked Stages Residency at the Pillsbury House and a 2016 Jerome Film grant to write and direct an experimental and poetic web series about Black teens coming of age in Minneapolis, Sweetness of Wild, with filmmaker Mychal Fisher. She is the co-founder with Erin Sharkey of Free Black Dirt, an experimental arts production company.
Erin Sharkey is a poet, essayist, educator and graphic designer based in Minneapolis. She is the co-founder of an artist collective called Free Black Dirt and serves as the co-host for Black Market Reads, a weekly podcast about literature and black cultural production. Erin was a 2015 Givens Writing Fellow and is currently a Givens Foundation cultural producer-in-residence and Coffee House Press in the Stacks artist-in-residence at the Archie Givens, Sr. Collection of African American Literature at the University of MN and also is a consultant with Umbra: Search African American History.
//EVENT//
November 3: Free Black Dirt Reading
Free Black Dirt, aka Erin Sharkey and Junauda Petrus will be sharing the fruits of their witch residency with a reading. Erin will be sharing a piece from her memoir about gender, jealousy and Kermit the frog. Junauda will be sharing an excerpt from her forthcoming young adult novel that centers around young love, young death and queer ponderings on Whitney Houston.
7pm. Free.