Aja Monet is an American contemporary poet, writer, lyricist and activist from Brooklyn, New York. Early life Monet began writing and performing poetry in high school at Baruch College Campus High School in Manhattan. One of her first poetic memories was when she wrote a poem for a class that compelled the teacher, who encouraged Monet to continue writing. Monet competed with a poem for her high school talent show, and won, and started to find ways to get more involved in the city's writing programs. She got involved with the organization Urban Word NYC who taught Monet that poetry could be a career. When she was 17, she attended Brave New Voices, Youth Speaks' national poetry competition, which politicized her by showing her what issues teens were facing around the country. Monet was in class at BCC High School when the 9/11 attacks occurred. Monet has stated that she was more afraid of the police growing up than any other people in her community. According to the Village Voice, "Growing up in Brooklyn, Monet witnessed first-hand the mounting tensions between the police and the Black community in New York City. She remembers the pain she felt watching the heads of young Black boys being lowered into the backs of police cars, the anger that rose up when officers would “taunt” her uncle and brother during their patrols through her neighborhood." Career Monet was the youngest poet to ever hold the title Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam Champion at the age of 19 in 2007, and is the last woman to have won this title since. She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby, with poems "about love and intimacy as a primary aspect of freedom fighting". She earned her certificate of Bachelor of Arts from Sarah Lawrence College and MFA in writing from Art Institute of Chicago. Not far from her graduation, she published two E-books, Black Unicorn Sings (2010) and Inner-City Chants and Cyborg Ciphers (2014). She also did co-editing and arrangements of the spoken word Chorus: A Literary Mixtape (2012). Monet was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry for her collection My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter. A starred review in Publishers Weekly praised Monet's "stunning and evocative language" as she "strikingly illustrates the passage from girlhood to womanhood". In the 2015, Monet