​When We Are Bold

Aja Monet is an American poet, performer and activist of Cuban-Jamaican descent from Brooklyn, New York. In 2007, at age 19, she was the youngest poet to have ever become the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam Champion. In 2014, she won the “One to Watch Award” from the YWCA of the City of New York. Her most recent book of poetry is Inner-City Chants & Cyborg Cyphers.

Read June Jordan: Finding My Way Home 
by Aja Monet in When We Are Bold: Women Who Turn Our Upsidedown World Right
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Prolific poet, activist and teacher, June Jordan was born to Jamaican immigrant parent in Harlem in 1936, and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. She was a passionate and influential voice for liberation, and was fiercely dedicated to civil rights, women’s rights and sexual freedom. In her 1982 classic personal essay, “Report from the Bahamas”, June Jordan broke new ground discussing both the possibilities and difficulties of self-identification on the basis of race, class, and gender identity. The essay became an important contribution to women’s and gender studies, sociology, and anthropology. She died in 2002.