aja monet is a Grammy-nominated surrealist blues poet, musician, and cultural worker whose poems sing to us of love, gender, justice, and spirituality. Florida Water, her latest collection, is a vulnerable meditation about the poet’s migration to South Florida in search of love, connection, and belonging. This multi-genre event will move between mediums, combining music and poetry for an unforgettable evening.
As a community organizer, poet, and musician, aja monet moves between mediums, each one an element to her writing. Building off a tradition rooted in oratorical facility, monet is the conduit for her predecessors to channel through.
She is the author of the poetry collection My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter (Haymarket Books, 2017), and of two chapbooks, The Black Unicorn Sings and Inner-City Cyborgs and Ciphers. monet also co-edited Chorus: A Literary Mixtape alongside poet-actor-director Saul Williams. Her newest book, Florida Water, is out from Haymarket Books in June 2025.
Inspired by the cleansing water often used in spiritual baths, Florida Water is an ode to the myriad ways a poem can rinse, reflect, reveal, and unravel us. An honest meditation on migrating to South Florida for love, connection, and community, these poems lay bare the challenging dance between the role of the artist, lover, and organizer. monet confronts the interpersonal truths of community organizing while also uncovering the state’s fraught history with racial prejudice, maroon communities, and natural disasters. This intimate collection of lyrical poems are the artifacts of her search for belonging and healing as she wades through the rising tides of climate change, heartbreak, and systemic violence.
monet cut her teeth within the walls of the legendary Nuyorican Poets Café, where she won the title of Grand Slam Champion in 2007 at age 19, making her the youngest Grand Slam Champion in the venue’s history.
Her debut album, when the poems do what they do, was nominated for a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album in 2024. The album explores themes of resistance, love, and the inexhaustible quest for joy. These are poems of urgency and want, and the rallying cry to demolish the insidious systems from which our futures seem to be wrought. In other words, “If we had a sense of humor we’d be more radical. More migrant than citizen we’d breathe the air clean and ration our resources…we would melt ALL the guns.” monet crafts a work that can be entered from many doors. These aren’t poems for poets, but poems for everyone.
Awarded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award for Poetry (2019), the Nelson Mandela Changemaker Award (2024), The Harry Belafonte Voices for Social Justice Award (2024), and the Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Vanguard Award (2025), monet also serves as the Artistic Creative Director for V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls. In 2022, she created “VOICES,” an audio play amplifying the stories of black women across the diaspora and the African continent.
monet graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
