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Sky Poems is a poetry and flag-raising event that provides a space of reflection and celebrates Minneapolis in the wake of Metro Surge. Local artist and flag-maker A.P. Looze has collaborated with three local poets: award-winning poet Danez Smith, current Minneapolis Poet Laureate Junauda Petrus, and former Minneapolis Poet Laureate Heid E. Erdrich– to hand sew flags adorned with their poetry to raise up onto the flag pole at the Land Stewardship Project. Each of these poets have written in response to the violence, loss, and collective resilience of Minneapolis in response to Metro Surge, have honored community members such as Renee Good and Alex Pretti while affirming our collective strength and love for this city and place. This event is an opportunity to witness and experience these poet’s powerful words together in one event. Sky Poems will include readings from each of these poets and a raising of one of the poet’s poems up onto the flag pole. Each poet’s flags will fly for approximately one month.Those attending the event are encouraged to bring their own blankets and chairs to sit on, as well as any snacks or comfort items.
The event will be ASL-interpreted, and there will be access to restrooms on-site.
This project is funded through The City of Minneapolis’s Cultural District Arts Fund.
About the Artists
A.P. Looze is a Minneapolis-based inter-disciplinary artist working across performance, music, textiles and other mediums. Their performances have been produced by The Guthrie, 20% Theatre, Pillsbury House, and Red Eye Theater. They were a 2018 Naked Stages Fellow, a 2019 Art(ist) on the Verge Fellow, a 2025 Cedar Commissions Fellow, and a 2023-25 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow among other awards. Their custom pride flag, We Will Not Be Eradicated is displayed at the MN Textile Center. Most recently they held a trans and non-binary flag-raising ceremony, with 12 hand-sewn flags based on trans and non-binary people’s internal magic. The ceremony was accompanied by a hand sewn 25x42 foot trans flag that has also appeared in the 2026 May Day Parade.
Danez Smith is the author of four collections including Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and most recently Bluff, a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry (twice), the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award (twice), the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Danez is proud Black, Queer, HIV-Positive poet who writes from those intersections about love, community, pleasure, politics, mental health, our responsibility to the future, and all the shimmering, complex things that make us human.Danez has received fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, United States Artist, The National Endowment for The Arts, Princeton University, Cave Canem, and more. Danez lives in the Twin Cities with their people and teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, MN. Their fifth collection of poems, Love Time, will be published in September 2027.
Junauda Petrus is a creative activist, writer, playwright, and multi-dimensional performance artist who is born on Dakota land, West-Indian descended, and African-sourced. Her work centers around Black wildness, futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, spectacle and shimmer. She is the author of The Stars And The Blackness Between Them, winner of the 2020 Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award and is the current Poet Laureate of Minneapolis.
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.
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Event venue
821 E 35th St, Minneapolis, MN 55407-4962, United States
Tickets
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