Celebrating Junauda Petrus' Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers?

Please join Moon Palace Books and Ricardo Levins Morales on Wednesday, April 12th at 7:00pm to celebrate the release of Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers? by Junauda Petrus. 

**This is an in-person event. Masks are required in store. Social Distancing is encouraged.**

Petrus first published and performed this poem after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. With every subsequent police shooting, it has taken on new urgency, culminating in the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, blocks from Junauda's home.
 
In its picture book incarnation, Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers? is a joyously radical vision of community-based safety and mutual aid. It is optimistic, provocative, and ultimately centered in fierce love. Debut picture book artist Kristen Uroda has turned Junauda's vision for a city without precincts into a vibrant and flourishing urban landscape filled with wise and loving grandmothers of all sorts.

Junauda Petrus is a writer, pleasure activist, filmmaker and performance artist, born on Dakota land of Black-Caribbean descent. Her work centers around wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer and liberation. Her debut novel, The Stars and the Blackness Between Them, earned a Coretta Scott King honor. She lives in Minneapolis with her wife and family.

Ricardo Levins Morales is an artist and organizer based in Minneapolis. He uses his art as a form of political medicine to support individual and collective healing from the injuries and ongoing reality of oppression.