City of Minneapolis Poet Laureate

Junauda Petrus is a Minneapolis-born creative visionary, writer, playwright, and performance artist of Black Trinidadian and Crucian descent. Her work celebrates Black wildness, futurism, and ancestral healing, weaving poetics and storytelling with histories re-membered through dreaming and research.  

Deeply inspired by her parents and ancestors who immigrated from the Caribbean, Junauda’s art reflects the magic, resilience, as well as trauma carried across generations. Her work resonates with themes of the Middle Passage, the African diaspora, and the lives of Black communities here in Minneapolis. She explores ancestral magic, queerness, and womanhood, often infusing speculative fiction and magical realism into her creations.  

Junauda Petrus embodies the creativity, diversity, and richness of Minneapolis’ cultural fabric. Her artistry reminds us of the transformative power of storytelling to connect us to the past, illuminate the present, and imagine the future.   

MN State Poet Laureate

Gwen Nell Westerman is a poet, visual artist, and scholar. Her roots are deep in the landscape of the tallgrass prairie and reveal themselves in her art and writing. She is an enrolled citizen of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, and her father’s family is from the Heipa District. Her mother’s family is from the Flint District of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Neither of her parents spoke English when they were sent as small children to boarding schools in Oklahoma and South Dakota. Singing and writing for as long as she can remember, Gwen understands from experience the important ways language and the land shape who we are. She was appointed as the Poet Laureate of Minnesota by Governor Tim Walz in 2021.

City of Minneapolis Poet Laureate

Heid E. Erdrich is the author of nine books of poetry and prose Heid E. Erdrich is a curator and teacher. Erdrich edited the anthology New Poets of Native Nations and co-edited the newly published Boundless: Abundance in Native American Art and Literature. She served as the inaugural Minneapolis Poet Laureate supported by an Academy of American Poets award. Erdrich held the 2025 James Welch Distinguished Visiting position at University of Montana Missoula. Erdrich’s on-going project is Poetry Service Announcement (PoeS.A.) which promotes poetry as public art. She serves her communities through formal and informal mentorship, poetry interventions, and in activating collaborative response between communities. 

MN State Poet Laureate

Joyce Sutphen grew up on a farm near St. Joseph, Minnesota, and currently lives in Chaska.  She has degrees from the University of Minnesota, including a Ph.D. in Renaissance Drama.  Her first book, Straight Out of View, won the Barnard New Women's Poets Prize (Beacon Press, 1995, republished by Holy Cow! Press in 2001).  Coming Back to the Body (Holy Cow! Press, 2000) was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award and Naming the Stars (Holy Cow! Press, 2004) won the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry.  In 2005, Red Dragonfly Press published Fourteen Sonnets in a letterpress edition, and in 2006 Sutphen co-edited the award-winning anthology To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present (New Rivers Press). 

Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Minnesota Monthly, Water-Stone, and many other journals, and she has had work featured in Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry, and on The Writer's Almanac.  She has also been a guest on A Prairie Home Companion, hosted by Garrison Keillor.  In 2011 she was named the second Minnesota Poet Laureate by Governor Mark Dayton, following the tenure of Robert Bly.

City of Rochester Poet Laureate

Jean Prokott is the author of the poetry collection The Second Longest Day of the Year,which won the Howling Bird Press Book Prize and was published with Howling Bird Press in November 2021, and of the chapbook The Birthday Effect (Black Sunflowers 2021). She is a recipient of the AWP Intro Journals Award and the John Calvin Rezmerski Memorial Grand Prize with the League of Minnesota Poets, and she has poetry and nonfiction published in Verse Daily, Rattle, Arts & Letters, Great Lakes Review, RHINO, Red Wheelbarrow, and Sierra Nevada Review, among other journals.  She has received scholarships from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study the Philosophers of Education at Boston University and to study John Steinbeck at Stanford & San Jose State University. 

Prokott has taught at the high school, college, and graduate levels for over fifteen years and has designed original curriculum for over ten courses, including Philosophy, Creative Writing, Literature and History of Film, American Literature, AP Language & Composition, and Implementation of Instruction and Curriculum Planning. 

St. Paul Youth Poet Laureate

Donte Collins is a neurodivergent afro-surrealist blues poet, playwright, and movement artist named the Inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of Saint Paul, Minnesota. They have received fellowships, scholarships, and awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Adroit Journal, the Mcknight Foundation, The National Urban League, The 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 theatre, spoken word and performance. Their choreopoem “Mercy” is forthcoming.   

City of Minneapolis Honorary Poet

Andrea Jenkins is currently the president of the Minneapolis City Council and represents the 8th Ward in South Minneapolis. She grew up in Chicago and graduated from Lindblom Technical High School in 1979.

Jenkins is the first Black transgender woman to be elected to public office in the United States. She was first elected to the council in 2017 with 73% of the vote.

Before being elected, Jenkins worked for twelve years as a policy aide to two members of the Minneapolis City Council and subsequently served as the oral historian for the Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota Libraries, documenting the lived experiences of transgender and gender nonconforming people in the Upper Midwest and the United States.

A poet and artist as well as a public official, Andrea is the author of the poetry collection The T is Not Silent: New and Selected Poems (Purple Lioness Press, 2015) and contributor to the acclaimed anthologies Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose and Pride (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2019), A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016), and Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2015).