Carnegie Hall

aja monet is a Grammy Award–nominated Surrealist Blues Poet. Her poems are a work of gravity. They are a fundamental for which all things are attracted, considered upon, and enacted towards. Her work moves, constantly, between origin and outcome, allowing her poems to exist in converse. On her debut album, when the poems do what they do, we glimpse her indefatigable commitment to speak. Those thematic origins of this album at times center resistance, love, and the inexhaustible quest for joy. The songs throughout are insistent and unrelenting, with some reminiscent of jazz-club virtuosity and melee while others act as a healing balm of Gilead, moving like that of the call to intercessory prayer.

As a community organizer, poet, and educator, aja monet moves between mediums, each one an element to her writing. Organizing and activism manifest as part of a process toward liberation, with the poems, the music, and the art serving as the scribe of the time. Building on oratorical traditions, aja monet is the conduit through which her predecessors may channel. At any given time, you may find the revolutionary spirit of Audre Lorde and The Last Poets, you’ll feel June Jordan, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, and even the expressive ephemerality of a passing blue note.

Her first full collection of poems, my mother was a freedom fighter, is a testament to all mothers, women, and girls who struggle to live, love, and move freely in the world, and was nominated for a NAACP Image Award for Poetry. In 2019, aja monet was awarded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award for Poetry. In 2024, she launches her next full collection of poems, Florida Water, with Haymarket Books.