Aja Monet’s vision of poetry is anchored in history, still utterly of-the-moment, and writing the future. 

This is “Still We Write,” a series that profiles Black contemporary poets in honor of National Poetry Month. And for this installment, we chatted with Aja Monet, a leading voice among contemporary Black poets whose words cut like glass and heal like medicine.

Monet herself emphasizes poetry as an “ancient tradition” rooted in the heart and spirit. In a recent conversation with BET, she says, “The page becomes a real spaceship,” a gateway for transcending time and imagining new worlds. This cosmic view matches her label as a “surrealist blues poet” – a nod to poetry’s power to mix creativity, resistance, and deep feeling. “The art form is timeless,” Monet says. “The premise of how we approach the art form will connect us to other periods of time for sure, especially if we know what we're doing.”

Monet made it clear that poetry is not separate from the world we live in — it is one of the tools we use to survive it. She says that many of the crises we face are tied to “a lack of political imagination,” and argued that artists have always been the ones tasked with imagining otherwise. “How do we democratize that process?” she asked. “How do we make it more accessible for the public and for the people to recognize their power to imagine another way?”

That belief runs through everything Monet says about the art form. She described poetry as “part of a continuum” and grounded the craft in what she described as “the technology of the spirit…of the soul of the heart and of the mind.” 

In a world obsessed with devices and productivity, Monet says what we have failed to upgrade is the human heart. For her, poetry remains one of the rare places where feeling becomes knowledge and emotional truth becomes a way forward. “It’s cosmic, what we do,” she says. 

Monet also made a powerful case for poetry as a living Black tradition — one rooted in sound, memory, and study. She rejected narrow ideas of what poetry is supposed to look like, saying that she does not see herself as an interruption or an expansion to the art form, but as “a part of poetry.”

She described Black poetic practice as something abundant and ancient, and explained that the page is not a limit, but a launch point, describing writing as a place where poets transcend time and space. 

That sense of inheritance showed up again when she spoke about Black poets she studied, the mentors who shaped her, and the responsibility of making the art form accessible without flattening its depth. Voices like Sekou Sundiata, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Jayne Cortez helped Monet see what was possible in her own work. “Not in the effort to try to be like them,” Monet says, “but to find my own way of being me, was harnessed through studying them and how they got to be who they are. I think that mentorship and study is so important for us to learn our own voice. You find your own voice by being guided.”

Monet says she takes the calling seriously because poetry is not just something she does; it is something that has “held on” to her and helped raise her. And when asked why it still matters to write, her answer was simple and devastatingly clear: “Be the poem we need right now.” 

And she’s doing just that. Monet has a poetry album coming out on May 22nd (and available for pre-order) called “the color of rain” that she worked on closely with Meshell Ndegeocello and her partner Justin Brown. “I see the poem as sheet music, so, to be able to work with musicians and to be intentional about how that comes to be, is really meaningful for me, and a lot of the stuff I worked on on this record…I think it's a reflection of my best writing,” Monet said.

Want more from Aja Monet? Check out her piece “elsewhere,” featuring Georgia Anne Muldrow, Meshell Ndegeocello, and Justin Brown: