Aja Monet

Aja Monet, recognized foremost as a poet, first turned toward musical expression in the closing years of the 2010s. Partnerships with Eryn Allen Kane and the Smoke Signals Collective preceded the arrival of her opening full-length recording, the 2023 album When the Poems Do What They Do.

Monet composed her initial verses at eight years old and carried an early devotion to narrative craft, taking part in poetry workshops and contests across her secondary-school period. At nineteen she claimed the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam as its youngest-ever recipient, then sharpened her craft through an MFA in Writing at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. Printed collections followed throughout the 2010s, beginning with the 2010 debut The Black Unicorn Sings, continuing with 2014’s Inner-City Chants and Cyborg Ciphers, and reaching 2017’s My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, which earned a nomination for the NAACP Image Award.

Monet entered musical terrain more fully in the late 2010s. She made her recorded introduction on Eryn Allen Kane’s 2019 LP a tree planted by water and, after co-founding the Miami-based Smoke Signals Collective in 2016, contributed to the group’s first mixtape, the rap-oriented The FREE Tape issued in 2021. Her own solo project surfaced the following year as When the Poems Do What They Do, a jazz-rooted spoken-word work whose scope extends from sweeping assessments of global structures to close observations of romantic life, with instrumental support supplied by Christian Scott on trumpet, Samora Pinderhughes on piano, Elena Pinderhughes on flute, Luques Curtis on bass, Weedie Braimah on djembe, and Marcus Gilmore on drums.