aja monet

Poet Aja Monet began exploring musical avenues during the late 2010s, collaborating with Eryn Allen Kane and the Smoke Signals Collective before releasing her debut album, When the Poems Do What They Do, in 2023. Penning her first poems at age eight, Monet was passionate about storytelling from a young age, involved in poetry workshops and competitions throughout her high school years. At age 19, she became the youngest-ever winner of the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam, and soon consolidated her talent by studying for an MFA in Writing at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. Her first volumes of work arrived during the 2010s: she debuted with 2010’s The Black Unicorn Sings, followed later that decade by 2014’s Inner-City Chants and Cyborg Ciphers and 2017’s My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, the latter of which received a nomination for the NAACP Image Award. During the late 2010s, Monet began making her first moves into music. Alongside a debut appearance on Eryn Allen Kane’s 2019 LP a tree planted by water, she collaborated with the Smoke Signals Collective: having co-founded the Miami-based arts group in 2016, she worked with the collective on their rap-centric first mixtape, 2021’s The FREE Tape. Monet’s own solo debut arrived in 2023’s When the Poems Do What They Do; a spoken word set diving from vast critiques of global systems to intimate details of romance, the jazz-centric album featured musical accompaniment from Christian Scott (trumpet), Samora Pinderhughes (piano), Elena Pinderhughes (flute), Luques Curtis (bass), Weedie Braimah (djembe), and Marcus Gilmore (drums). ~ David Crone