Aja Monet
Aja Monet Bacquie (born August 21, 1987) is an American contemporary poet, writer, lyricist and activist. Biography. Aja Monet is of Cuban-Jamaican descent from Brooklyn, New York. She is known to be the youngest poet to have ever become the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam Champion at the age of 19 in 2007 and is the last woman to have won this title since. Monet is also known for her activist work, and has been an active participant of the SayHerName campaign, which has highlighted police brutality against black women. 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". 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”.