aja monet

aja monet grew up in Brooklyn and came up through the New York slam scene. At 19 she became the youngest poet to win the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam title. Her books include the collection My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, and her writing moves between the personal and the political, with much of it concerned with family, love and organising.

Her debut album, When the Poems Do What They Do, came out in 2023 and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. On record and on stage she reads her poems with musicians who improvise around the cadence of her voice, so the pieces shift from one performance to the next. She has also spent years based in Miami, where she co-founded the Smoke Signals Studio arts space.