Award-winning poet visits RE's upper school
Award-winning poet Aja Monet shared her personal story with RE's upper school students, describing how poetry helped her cope with the isolation and injustice she experienced growing up in Brooklyn with a single mother. The Caribbean-American artist encouraged students to use their words and voices to help shape the culture around them. A good way to start? Carry a journal, she said, and use it.
Poetry "was a big part of the way I started to try to find connection and community and expression," she said during an assembly Feb. 25. "Poetry became my first outlet, my friend ... I found a home in language. Language helped me arrange and communicate ... what I was experiencing."
Monet's first full collection of poetry, My Mother Was A Freedom Fighter, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. She won New York City's preeminent slam poetry title, the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam award, and was invited to the national Women's March in Washington in 2017 to present one of her poems.
Monet read two of her poems during the assembly, then met after school in the Pagoda with a group of students for a poetry workshop. She was introduced to the upper school student body by Diego Duckenfield '20, the president of the Black Student Association, and Kareena Rudra '20, the president of the Poetry Club.
A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Monet lives in Miami and is founder of Smoke Signals Studio, a community collective dedicated to music, art, culture and community organizing. She was a featured speaker at TEDWomen 2018.
Monet concluded her talk to upper school students by urging them to stand together in solidarity and celebrate each other's differences.
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Monet's first full collection of poetry, My Mother Was A Freedom Fighter, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. She won New York City's preeminent slam poetry title, the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam award, and was invited to the national Women's March in Washington in 2017 to present one of her poems.
Monet read two of her poems during the assembly, then met after school in the Pagoda with a group of students for a poetry workshop. She was introduced to the upper school student body by Diego Duckenfield '20, the president of the Black Student Association, and Kareena Rudra '20, the president of the Poetry Club.
A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Monet lives in Miami and is founder of Smoke Signals Studio, a community collective dedicated to music, art, culture and community organizing. She was a featured speaker at TEDWomen 2018.
Monet concluded her talk to upper school students by urging them to stand together in solidarity and celebrate each other's differences.
Middle School
2045 South Bayshore Drive, Coconut Grove, FL 33133Phone: 305 250 6850
Upper School
3575 Main Highway, Coconut Grove, FL 33133Phone: 305 460 8800
Founded in 1903, Ransom Everglades School is a coeducational, college preparatory day school for grades 6 - 12 located on two campuses in Coconut Grove, Florida. Ransom Everglades School produces graduates who "believe that they are in the world not so much for what they can get out of it as for what they can put into it." The school provides rigorous college preparation that promotes the student's sense of identity, community, personal integrity and values for a productive and satisfying life, and prepares the student to lead and to contribute to society.