Florida Water: aja monet + Nadege Green In Conversation

Join aja monet and Nadege Green for a reading and conversation in celebration of the release of Florida Water, monet’s new book of poems, on its release date.

Florida Water is a collection of poems that, like the cleansing waters of spiritual baths, rinse, reflect, and reveal the raw truths that lie within.

In this vulnerable meditation, aja monet reflects on her migration to South Florida in search of love, connection, and belonging, unearthing the delicate balance between the poet, lover, and community organizer. These poems lay bare the tender dance of relationships, entwining the personal with the political, as they confront the state’s fractured history of racial prejudice, marooned peoples, and the unruly forces of nature.

In Florida Water, each poem is an artifact—an offering from her time spent wading through the rising tides of climate change, heartbreak, and systemic violence. With each line, monet immerses us deeper into the water, where the currents of memory, struggle, and survival pull us toward both despair and hope.

aja monet is a surrealist blues poet, musician, and cultural worker whose poems sing to us of love, gender, justice, and spirituality. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her writing sways between realms where the poetic is both a prayer and a call to action. Her debut poetry collection, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, a tribute to women and girls in the pursuit of freedom, earned a 2018 NAACP Image Award nomination for poetry. In 2023, she released When the Poems Do What They Do, a debut album of jazz and blues poetry. In 2024, she earned a Grammy nomination for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album, a testament to her voice, both on the page and in the world. As artistic creative director for the Voices: A Scared Sisterscape audioplay and campaign with V-Day, monet is part of the global movement to end violence against women and girls. monet is a recipient of the EBONY Power 100 Artist in Residence Award, Tribeca Film Festival’s Harry Belafonte Social Justice Award, and the Nelson Mandela Changemaker Award.

Nadege Green is the Director of Community Research and Storytelling at Community Justice Project. In her role, she works with community-based organizations fighting for justice in Florida by supporting narrative-driven strategies in support of racial justice and human rights. Whether it's through the integration of the arts, creative policy papers, investigative research, storytelling workshops, or community memory work—she comes into her position believing in the power and expertise of directly impacted people. Green leads CJP’s artist in residence program and justice film collaborations. She is an award-winning journalist with bylines in Harper’s Bazaar, The Atlantic, NPR and more. Green is a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and most recently was a Distinguished Writer/Activist in residence at New York University's Center for Black Visual Culture. In her spare time, she is an expert thrift store connoisseur with quite an impressive rare Black books collection. A child of Haitian immigrants and former farmworkers, she was born and raised in the county of Dade.