Rescheduled: Green Roof Poetry curated by Free Black Dirt with Junauda Petrus and Erin Sharkey

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Donte Collins (they/them; b. Chicago Heights,1996) is a neurodivergent afro-surrealist blues poet, playwright, and movement artist named the Inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of St. Paul. They have received fellowships, scholarships, and awards from the Academy of American Poets, Adroit Journal, McKnight Foundation, National Urban League, Dramatist Guild Foundation, Frontier Poetry, Indiana Review, BOMB Magazine, and Augsburg University. They believe poems allow us to wander back to ourselves, to meet ourselves anew. They believe poems are deeply human gestures here to gather us, to propose new, critical & compassionate floor plans for the future, for the self. They believe poems are the beginning. Collins is the author of the poetry collection Autopsy (Button Poetry, 2017), a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award. They are an alum of TruArtSpeaks, an arts & culture organization cultivating literacy, leadership, and social justice through the study & application of Spoken Word and Hip Hop culture. Collins is the recipient of a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist fellowship for theater, spoken word, and performance. Their choreopoem “Mercy” is forthcoming.

Mary Moore Easter, finalist for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in 2017, is a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and Cave Canem Fellow. In addition to From the Flutes of Our Bones, Easter is the author of three other books of poetry. Her poems have been published in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Christian Century, Water Stone, SoFloPoJo, and several anthologies. Raised in a musical household, her love of poems and the poetic voice persisted alongside her adult career as an independent dancer/choreographer and Founder and Director of Carleton College’s dance program. Her awards include Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board (2020), Pushcart Prize–nomination, Bush Artist Fellowship in Choreography, multiple McKnight Awards in Interdisciplinary Arts, Loft Literary Center’s Creative Non-Fiction Award, and residencies at Ragdale and Anderson Center. Easter holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence and an MA in music for dancers from Goddard. A Virginia transplant, she rerooted at Minnesota’s Carleton College. Now emerita professor of dance, veteran dancer/choreographer, her chapbook is Walking from Origins.

Junauda Petrus is an abolitionist, writer, filmmaker, runaway witch, soul sweetener, and performance artist born on Dakota land of Trinidadian and Crucian descent. Petrus’s work employs poetics and experiences re-membered via research and ancestral dreaming. Her first book, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them, received the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award. This year she released her first children’s book, Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers?, based on an abolitionist future. She is the cofounder, with Erin Sharkey, of Free Black Dirt, an artist collective based in Minneapolis, creating space for the literary artists’ community. 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.

Andréa “DJ Drea” Potter is a Community Nurturer, artist, and culture bearer. Her offerings are made with an intention to capture zeitgeists across generations that continue to inspire our self-preservation, social justice, and collective healing. Her movement practice has significant foundations and influence from Afro-Brazilian Capoeira and Afro-Cuban and West African dance disciplines. She has deep appreciation and love for music and aspires to conjure a sense of warmth, nostalgia, and freedom with movement and dance through her eclectic music collection and style as a DJ. Potter’s training and experience as an artist overall has a special and effective influence on her practice as a holistic wellness practitioner and body worker and her approach to social betterment.

Erin Sharkey is a writer, arts and abolition organizer, cultural worker, and film producer based in Minneapolis. She is the editor of A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars (Milkweed). Sharkey is a founding coop member of the Fields at Rootsprings, a retreat and respite space in central Minnesota, and cofounder, with Junauda Petrus, of an experimental arts collective called Free Black Dirt. Sharkey has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, Penumbra Theatre, Bell Museum of Natural History, Black Visions, Headwaters Foundation for Justice, Anderson Center, and the Jerome Foundation. She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and teaches at Minneapolis College and with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Look for her as the Revisionary as part of the Loft Literary Center’s Lit! Commons.

Yonci (they/she) is a Cultural Curator, DJ, Musician, and Writer born/raised/based in Minneapolis. Yonci’s practice is an intricate exploration, experimentation, and expansion into the past, present, and future of Black Queer traditions. With more than a decade of experience in traditional West African percussion and jazz instrumentation, radio programming, and arts education and community organizing, Yonci employs performance, the pen & page, bread breaking, and a love ethic in solidarity with marginalized communities and in efforts to create a future free of anti-Blackness and queerphobia. Yonci has performed with Voice of Culture Drum and Dance, Dua Saleh & Vie Boheme for the Cedar Cultural Center Commissions, Blu Bone for Hi Cotton Ball, and Cameron Downey for the Orchid Blues installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara. Their instrumentation has been featured in Rashaad Newsome’s Self-Inventions Monument (2023), with reviews on MplsArt.org and Hair and Nails Gallery Zine. Yonci hosted Studio Arisaema’s artist panel 10’s Talk: Black Trans Femmes in Music (2024), and is host of “Mostly Jazz” on KFAI 90.3fm.

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