Aja Monet
Popularity
Aja Monet has one upcoming show in the Netherlands: on November 6, 2026 at Crossing Border Festival, Den Haag.
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About
Aja Monet made history at 19 by becoming the youngest poet ever to win the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam Championship, and she remains the last woman to hold that title. Her work sits at a restless intersection of poetry, jazz, blues, soul and folk, and she brings that same energy to her debut album when the poems do what they do, released in 2023 with a lineup that includes Lonnie Holley, Samora Pinderhughes and Eryn Allen Kane. Pitchfork rated it a 7.4 and praised how it takes listeners through storm battered homes and jump rope competitions while interrogating Black joy and capitalism, while Jazzwise gave it four stars and the New York Times called it a nuanced exploration of Blackness. The album earned a Grammy nomination for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. Beyond the stage and studio, Monet co founded Smoke Signals Studio in Miami, an arts collective running on a barter system that ties studio time to community education. Her poetry collection My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter scored an NAACP Image Award nomination, with Publishers Weekly calling her language stunning and evocative. More recently she has been putting out new work, with the track elsewhere surfacing in early 2026.
