The Erotics of Abolition: A Conversation with Junauda Petrus and Alexis De Veaux
The Erotics of Abolition: A Conversation with Junauda Petrus and Alexis De Veaux
Envisioned as a necessary healing experience, in this conversation, black queer creatives Junauda Petrus and Alexis De Veaux will think through the meaning and application of the Erotics of Abolition. At a time when black women are being blamed for forest fires and any black, brown, queer, or trans person is being blamed for any and every catastrophe unfolding in the United States, this intergenerational, decolonizing black queer dialogue will talk through how we can reclaim love and the abundant joy of the flesh to redefine the meaning and practice of freedom. Moving through the cultural terrain of poetices, storytelling, and black circus performance, Petrus and De Veaux will model how wisdom flows through ancestral veneration, black eldership, and collaborative artistic practice.
Junauda Petrus is an abolitionist, writer, filmmaker, runaway witch, soul sweetener and performance artist born on Dakota land of Black Trinidadian and Crucian descent. Petrus’ work employs poetics and experiences re-membered via research, play and ancestral dreaming. Her first book, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them, received the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award. In 2023 she released her first children’s book, “Can We Please Give The Police Department to the Grandmother’s?” based on an abolitionist future that became a Minnesota Book Award Finalist. She is a co-founder of Free Black Dirt, a collective of artists, activists, and organizers committed to centering Black voices and narratives in the cultural landscape.
She centers her work on abolition, love, healing, wildness, laughter, sweetness, spectacle and shimmer. In her work as an aerialist she intertwined her background in black diaspora dance and explored stories of blackness reclaimed and re-imagined in the vertical space and is currently working on a novel, Black Circus inspired by themes of queer 90’s coming of age, black performance legacies of liberation and love through space, time and dimension.
ALEXIS DE VEAUX, PhD., is one of a stellar list of American writers highlighted by LIT CITY, a public art initiative of banners bearing their names and images in downtown Buffalo, New York, in recognition of the city’s renowned literary legacy. Co-Founder of The Center for Poetic Healing, a project of Lyrical Democracies (with Kathy Engel), and of the Flamboyant Ladies Theatre Company (with Gwendolen Hardwick), ALEXIS DE VEAUX is a black queer feminist writer whose work in multiple genres is nationally and internationally known. Born and raised in Harlem, New York City, Ms. De Veaux is published in five languages-English, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publi cations, and she is the author of Spirits In The Street (1973); an award-winning children’s book, Na-ni (1973); Don’t Explain, A Song of Billie Holiday (1980); Blue Heat: A Portfolio of Po ems and Drawings (1985); Spirit Talk (1997); An Enchanted Hair Tale (1987), a recipient of the 1988 Coretta Scott King Award presented by the American Library Association and the 1991 Lorraine Hansberry Award for Excellence in Children’s Literature. Ms. De Veaux’s plays include Circles, (1972); The Tapestry (1975); A Season to Unravel (1979); NO (1980); and Elbow Rooms (1986).
She also authored Warrior Poet, A Biography of Audre Lorde (2004). The first biography of the pioneering lesbian poet, Warrior Poet has won several prestigious awards including the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award, Nonfiction (2005), the Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Outstanding Book Award (2004), and the Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Biography (2004). In other media, Ms. De Veaux’s work appears on several recordings, including the highly-acclaimed album, Sisterfire (Olivia Records, 1985). As an artist and lecturer she has traveled extensively throughout the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, Japan and Europe; and is recognized for her on-going contributions to a number of community-based organizations.
Ms. De Veaux was a member of the faculty of the University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, 1992-2013; teaching, most recently, as Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender studies in the Department of Transnational Studies. Her most recent work, a novel, Yabo, was published by Redbone Press (2014) and was awarded the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is on the board of the Roadwork Center for Cultures in Disputed Territory and co-founder (with Amy Horowitz) of The Enclave Habitat, an emerging network of socially conscious artists and activists.
Further information is available on her author website, alexisdeveaux.com.