ALL THIS: Poets Aja Monet & Meghann Plunkett (012)

For our poetry special I got to talk with two phenomenal women. Aja Monet (left, photo by Brandon Guzman) is a Caribbean-American poet, performer, and educator from Brooklyn currently based in Little Haiti, Miami, where she is a cofounder of Smoke Signals Studio, dedicating her time to merging arts and culture with community organizing through her work with the Dream Defenders and the Community Justice Project. Her most recent collection of poetry, My Mother Was A Freedom Fighter (2017), was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Meghann Plunkett (photo by Adam Courtney) describes herself as a poet, coder, and dog enthusiast. She has won critical acclaim from Missouri Review, Third Coast Magazine, Narrative Magazine, North American Review, and the Academy of American Poets, among others. Later this month she will graduate as a Master of Fine Arts from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Aja and Meghann have been friends and trusted readers of each other's work since their undergraduate years at Sarah Lawrence College. Special thanks to director Cam Be for granting permission to use a clip from his brilliant video of Aja's poem "What I've Learned"; to Shayfer James for supplying instrumentals from his album Haunted Things for this special episode; to Roy Chambers for designing the glassed unicorn thumbnail; to Paula Roy for suggesting questions; and to my uncle Peter Meister for reading his haiku "Squirrel in Winter" at the top. It got me wondering about how poems work when I was only old enough to read the words.  Episode Transcript