aja monet

ABOUT this week’s guest:

On aja monet’s new album the color of rain, she has a song called “withness,” which contains this phrase: “the solidarity of sound”. What I hear in that phrase is the work of unifying language and sound with the people that make it, and as you will hear today, this is just one of the powerful gifts that this self-described surrealist blues poet brings to all that she does, and to the world. Her work as a community organizer, teacher, and poet is rooted in activism, particularly racial and social justice. Born and raised in Brooklyn, aja began writing poems as a child. In her teens, she discovered poetry performance and competition, and at age 19, she won the title of grand slam champion at the Nuyorican Poets Café, making her the youngest grand slam champion in the venue’s history. After doing her undergrad at Sarah Lawrence and her MFA in writing from the Art Institute of Chicago, aja released two e-books before her acclaimed debut published collection My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter came out in 2017. It was nominated for a 2018 NAACP image award for outstanding literary work, in 2019 she was awarded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas award for poetry. In addition to multiple musical collaborations, co-founding a social justice arts community in Miami called Smoke Signals, and her longtime work as an outspoken Palestinian rights activist, in 2020 aja monet became artistic creative director at V-Day, the global activist movement to end violence against all women, gender expansive people, girls, and the Earth, and in 2022, she created an audio play called Voices showcasing the stories and experiences of Black women across the diaspora and the African continent. aja’s Grammy-nominated debut poetry album, when the poems do what they do arrived in 2023, and last year, her second full collection of poems was published called Florida Water. I had the joy and honor of spending a little over an hour talking with aja monet in Brooklyn the day after her Carnegie Hall debut, and the day before her second album, the color of rain, was released. I'm thrilled to welcome aja monet as this week’s Shero in the spotlight.