Hawona Sullivan Janzen facts for kids

Hawona Sullivan Janzen is an American writer, poet, and performance artist who lives in Minnesota. She was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. Her art often explores big feelings that everyone experiences, like love, sadness, and hope.

Art and Career

Hawona Sullivan Janzen is a multi-talented artist. Her powerful poetry has been shared with a large audience on National Public Radio. She also sings improvisational jazz, which means she makes up the music as she performs, with a group called the Sonoglyph Collective.

She works with several arts organizations, like Forecast Public Art and the Hennepin Theatre Trust. She also helps run an art gallery at the University of Minnesota.

In 2017, she was part of an art project called Poetry of Resistance and Change. For this project, her poems were displayed in huge letters on the sides of buildings for everyone to see. The project also included hundreds of special cards and posters printed with poems using a classic method called letterpress.

In 2019, she received a special fellowship to create a performance art piece. In 2020, she and another artist, Kathy McTavish, created a very long performance piece that lasted for 638 hours.

Rondo Family Reunion: Remembering a Neighborhood

One of Sullivan Janzen's most famous projects is "Rondo Family Reunion," which she started in 2016. She worked with poet Clarence White and photographer Chris Scott. The project honored the history of the Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota.

What Happened to Rondo?

From the 1930s, Rondo was a lively and successful Black community. But in the 1950s, the government decided to build a huge highway, Interstate 94, right through the middle of the neighborhood.

The construction of the highway in 1955 forced hundreds of families and businesses to leave. Many people lost their homes. This event deeply affected the community for many years.

Telling Rondo's Stories

After a sad event happened in her community in 2016, Sullivan Janzen noticed that news stories often focused only on sad things. She wanted to change that. She said she wondered, "Why is it that the only time the media comes to talk about us is when we are suffering from grief and experiencing loss?"

The "Rondo Family Reunion" project was created to celebrate the happy and everyday stories of the Rondo community. The artists talked to older people who used to live in Rondo and listened to their memories.

Then, they created special lawn signs and placed them all over the old neighborhood. The signs featured beautiful photographs and poems that told the stories of the people who once called Rondo home. This project helped bring the history and spirit of the community back to life.