What a great way to start a new literary year. Six poets laureate from across Minnesota will participate Thursday in the inaugural A Gathering of Poets Laureate: Poets Building Community, the culminating public program of Minneapolis poet laureate Junauda Petrus’s 2025-26 laureate year. It is designed to celebrate the power of poetry to build connection, spark change and imagine a new future together.
Petrus will be joined by Gwen Westerman, Minnesota State poet laureate; Jean Prokott, Rochester poet laureate; Donte Collins, former St. Paul Youth poet laureate; Heid E. Erdrich, inaugural Minneapolis poet laureate; and Joyce Sutphen, former Minnesota State poet laureate.
Guided by Petrus’s question — “What does community look like for you?” — the Laureates will share original poems and reflect on the civic and cultural work they carry into their communities. Moderator will be Cristeta Boarini, partnerships manager at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.
Here’s a look at these talented poets provided by program presenters Minneapolis Arts & Cultural Affairs Department, Loft Literary Center and Minnesota Humanities Center.
Junauda Petrus (Courtesy of the author)
PETRUS: Minneapolis-born writer, playwright and performance artist of Black Trinidadian and Crucian (Virgin Islands) descent. Her poetry celebrates Black wildness, futurism and ancestral healing, weaving poetics and storytelling with histories remembered through dreaming and research. Inspired by her parents and ancestors who immigrated from the Caribbean, her art reflects the magic, resilience and trauma caried across generations, resonating with themes of the Middle Passage, the African diaspora, and the lives of Black communities in Minneapolis. She is author of “The Stars and the Blackness Between Them,” winner of the American Library Association’s Coretta Scott King award.
Heid Erdrich (Courtesy of Angie Erdrich)
ERDRICH: During her term as inaugural Minneapolis poet laureate in 2024, Erdrich produced more than 30 public activities and worked with hundreds of poets, writers and enthusiasts. Author of nine books of poetry and prose, she is editor of the anthology “New Poets of Native Nations” and co-editor of the newly published “Boundless: Abundance in Native American Art and Literature.” Her on-going project is Poetry Service Announcement, which connects the peoples of Minneapolis/Bde Ota Othujwe and promotes poetry as public art. Winner of two Minnesota Book Awards, she serves her communities through formal and informal mentorship, poetry interventions and facilitating responses between communities. A member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, she was among 22 poets in the U.S. to receive a $50,000 grant from the Academy of American Poets.
Gwen Westerman (Courtesy of the author)
WESTERMAN: The first Native American to be a poet laureate (in 2021), she is also a visual artist and scholar with roots deep in the landscape of the tallgrass prairie that reveal themselves in her art and writing. An enrolled citizen of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, she understands from experience the important ways language and the way land shapes who we are.
Joyce Sutphen (Courtesy of the author)
SUTPHEN: Minnesota’s second poet laureate grew up on a farm near St. Joseph, Minn. Among her books are “Straight Out of View,” “Naming the Stars” (Minnesota Book Award), and “To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present,” which she co-edited. Her poems have appeared in national publications and journals and she has been a guest on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion.”
PROKOTT: She is winner of the Howling Bird Press prize for her collection “The Second Longest Day of the Year,” recipient of the AWP Intro Journals Award and the John Calvin Rezmerski Memorial Grand Prize from the League of Minnesota Poets. She has taught at the high school, college and graduate levels for more than 15 years, designing original curriculum for more than 10 courses, ranging from philosophy to the history of film.
COLLINS: A neurodivergent Afro-surrealist blues poet, playwright and movement artist, recipient of awards from the McKnight Foundation, National Urban League, Dramatist Guild Foundation and Augsburg University. They believe poems allow us to wander back to ourselves to meet ourselves anew and that poems are deeply human gestures here to gather us, to propose new, critical and compassionate “floor plans” for the future, for the self. They are the author of the collection “Autopsy” and received a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist fellowship for theater, spoken word and performance.
The program will also recognize Andrea Jenkins for her contributions as a poet and her pivotal role in establishing the Minneapolis Poet Laureate position as a member of the City Council, of which she is now president. She is the first Black transgender woman to be elected to public office in the U.S.
The Gathering of Poet Laureates begins at 5 p.m. Thursday at Open Book, 1101 Washington Ave. S., Mpls. Free, but registration does not guarantee a seat in the main performance space, which will be on a first-come first-served basis. Doors open at 4:30 p.m. and attendees are advised to arrive early. Reservations: loft.org/events/poets-building-community-gathering-poets-laureate. (The program will be streamed in an overflow room.)
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