The Mary Ann Key Book Club has returned! We are excited to announce that the selection for our 2025 season is “The Stars and the Blackness Between Them,” by local author Junauda Petrus.
Myron and Junauda discuss the new season's title. (1:55 duration, YouTube)
Junauda Petrus is a Minneapolis creative activist, writer, playwright, and multi-dimensional performance artist. Her work centers around Black wildness, futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, spectacle and shimmer. Her debut novel “The Stars and the Blackness Between Them” received the 2020 Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award.
Told in two distinct and irresistible voices, Junauda Petrus’s bold and lyrical debut, “The Stars and the Blackness Between Them,” is the story of two black girls from very different backgrounds finding love and happiness in a world that seems determined to deny them both. Junauda Petrus’s debut brilliantly captures the distinctly lush and lyrical voices of Mabel and Audre as they conjure a love that is stronger than hatred, prison, and death and as vast as the blackness between the stars.
Print copies of the book and immediate access to the ebook and downloadable audiobook are available from HCL starting on February 1.
I remember when I fell in love for the first time. I was in the fourth grade. She was in the sixth grade. At the end of the year, our middle school would hold an all-school band concert and the musicians from each grade would come together and play in the same section.
The girl I had admired played the clarinet, so I figured that if I too decided to play the clarinet, I would get the chance to somehow enter her orbit at that concert and complete the love story I’d written about us in my mind. But it never happened. Yes, we were both at the end-of-year concert. Yet, she sat on the other side of the room. The distance was a metaphor of our one-sided romance.
My story was a lot like the stories I’d witnessed on TV and in the movies. A young man and a young woman would meet, one of them would express their love for the other and maybe, they would decide that they were destined to be together before the closing credits. Those love stories, like so many others, impacted my childhood and the way I imagined love and knew love then: as only between a man and a woman.
Our latest selection for the seventh season of the Mary Ann Key Book Club is a tale about young love, care and affection. In Junauda Petrus’ book, “The Stars and the Blackness Between Them,” Audre moves to America to live with her father after she’s admonished by her mother for a sexual interaction with a young woman. And Mabel is a girl who is grappling with her sexuality and later, her own mortality.
This is a story about friendship, connection and adoration. It is also a book that offers insight on fantasy, spirituality and culture and the value of having something that feels like home. And yes, it is a love story, the kind I never witnessed when I was growing up – the kind that is too often hidden in conversations about young romance.
In short, Petrus offers a perspective on the nuance of love and every layer attached to it.
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Mary Ann Key Book Club Discussion: The Stars and the Blackness Between Them Multiple dates and locations
Join your neighbors in a discussion of our 2025 season selection. Learn more and register online.
Mary Ann Key Book Club: A Conversation with Junauda Petrus Wednesday, April 23, 2025, 6:30pm Minneapolis Central Library
Join the Mary Ann Key Book Club for an exclusive evening featuring Junauda Petrus. Petrus will be joined in conversation by Star Tribune columnist and book club partner Myron Medcalf. The conversation will conclude with a Q&A and book signing with the author. Media partner: Star Tribune. Sponsor: Friends of the Hennepin County Library.
Register to attend in-person.
Register to watch the Zoom livestream.
Teen Lit Con: A Conversation with Junauda Petrus Saturday, April 26, 12:30 p.m. Two Rivers High School, 1897 Delaware Ave, Mendota Heights, MN
For teens. Connect with Junauda and engage in activities centered around the book at Teen Lit Con, an event where YA authors, books, teens, and fun collide. The free event runs 10 a.m.-3 p.m. and is open to the public, but the event and activities are focused on teens. The goal is to give teens the opportunity to meet authors, learn about writing and publishing, and enjoy the literary fun. All readers of YA literature are welcome, but we want teens to feel that this event is for them.
Sankofa D.E.A.R. Time with Guest Author J. Darnell Johnson Sunday, February 9, 2-3pm Sumner Library
Join Dr. Talaya Tolefree and special guest author J. Darnell Johnson, who will read from his book “Ol’ Jim Crow’s Jubilee Day Caper.” We will come together to celebrate Black History Month by engaging in culture through storytelling, art, and crafts. Materials provided. Program funded with money from Minnesota’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Learn more.
Stories for Black History Month Saturday, February 22, 10-11am Washburn Library
Learn about characters from African and African American folktales and the tradition of storytelling in the African American community in this lively performance by Master Storyteller Kristie Lazenberry. Collaborator: Black Storytellers Alliance. Program funded with money from Minnesota’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Learn more.
About the Mary Ann Key Book Club
The book club was inspired by a Star Tribune column written by Myron Medcalf – the great-great-great-grandson of Mary Ann Key.
“I’m honored to partner with Hennepin County Library to launch the Mary Ann Key Book Club, named after the matriarch of my family, who was enslaved in Georgia in the 1850s. Purchased for $1,000 at the age of 14, Mary Ann Key persevered. Her body was in bondage, but slavery never stole the freedom of her heart, mind and soul. This book club is about focusing on the truths of the past, our challenges in the present and the possibilities of the future…” – Myron Medcalf
This program is supported by Friends of the Hennepin County Library. Their generous financial support is helping to provide greater access to print and eBook copies of the featured books.
Myron Medcalf's column in the Minnesota Star Tribune is a powerful platform to engage our community on the truths of the past, our challenges in the present, and the possibilities of the future.
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