Free Black Dirt is an artistic partnership formed by Minneapolis-based collaborators Junauda Petrus and Erin Sharkey.
Committed to creating original theatre and performance, hosting innovative events, organizing local artists, and promoting and supporting the emerging artists’ community in the Twin Cities, Free Black Dirt seeks to spark and engage in critical conversations.
Photo by Nance Musinguzi
Junauda Petrus
Junauda Petrus-Nasah is a writer, a soul sweetener, runaway witch, and multi-dimensional performance artist of Black-Caribbean descent, born and working on unceded Dakota land, Minneapolis. She employs poetics, the erotic, and experiences re-membered via ancestral dreaming within her writing. She’s written for the stage, including the aerial-poetic-play, There Are Other Worlds and co-wrote the puppet show, Queen with Erik Ehn. She wrote and directed, Sweetness of Wild, an experimental, episodic film project inspired by wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer and liberation. She is the co-founder of Free Black Dirt with Erin Sharkey. Her writing can be found in several anthologies, including Queer Voices, How I Resist and Pleasure Activism. Her first YA novel, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them received a Coretta Scott King Honor Award and was a Minnesota Book Award Finalist. She is currently writing her second young adult novel, Black Circus.
Erin Sharkey
Erin Sharkey is a writer, artistic organizer and cultural producer based in Minneapolis.
Erin was a Bell Museum resident artist, Loft Mentor Series mentee, VONA fellow, Jerome Travel and Study grantee, MN State Arts Board grantee, MRAC Next Step Fund grantee, and Givens Foundation fellow. She is editing, A Darker Wilderness, a forthcoming anthology of Black nature writing for Milkweed Editions. Erin teaches at Metro State University and with Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop. Currently, she is working in concert with other Black organizers and abolitionists to respond to COVID-19 and lead in this moment of uprising.