Solidarity Through Poetry: aja monet and Mohammed El-Kurd

A ticket is required to attend. You must complete the order form registration to receive your ticket. Attendees will be seated on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Located in the Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall, University of California, Berkeley.

Acclaimed poets, writers, and activists aja monet and Mohammed El-Kurd will read their work and join in a discussion moderated by Professor Micah Khater about poetry, solidarity, and the call-and-response of Black and Palestinian liberation struggles. This event is co-sponsored by the Departments of English, Ethnic Studies, and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures.

For more information, please contact Barbara Montano at [email protected] or 510-664-4324. If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Barbara Montano at [email protected] or 510-664-4324 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

aja monet is a Grammy nominated Surrealist Blues Poet. In 2007, she won the legendary Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe Grand slam poetry award title. She follows in the long legacy and tradition of poets participating and assembling in social movements. aja monet has collaborated across mediums and disciplines helping to shape and shift culture working with many internationally established artists, scholars, activists, and organizers. Her first full collection of poems entitled, my mother was a freedom fighter is a testament to all mothers, women, and girls who struggle to live, love, and move freely in the world. Her poems explore migration, spirituality, and femininity. In 2018, her book was nominated for a NAACP Image Award for Poetry and in 2019 she was awarded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award for Poetry.

aja monet also serves as the Artistic Creative Director for V-Day, a global movement to end violence against all women and girls. In 2022, she created an audio play called, VOICES, showcasing the stories and experiences of Black women across the diaspora and the African continent.

aja monet’s debut poetry album, when the poems do what they do was released on June 9, 2023, on drink sum wtr, a new Secretly Canadian imprint and nominated for a Grammy Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. Collaborators on the album include esteemed musicians Lonnie Holley, Christian Scott, Marcus Gilmore, Samora Pinderhughes, Weedie Braimah, and more.

In 2024 she will be launching her next full collection of poems called Florida Water with Haymarket Books.

You can find aja monet at www.ajamonet.com and on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and BandCamp.

Mohammed El-Kurd is an internationally touring and award-winning poet, writer, journalist, and organizer from Jerusalem, occupied Palestine. In 2021, He was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine. He is best known for his role as a co-founder of the #SaveSheikhJarrah movement. His work has been featured in numerous international outlets and he has appeared repeatedly as a commentator on major TV networks. Currently, El-Kurd serves as the first-ever Palestine Correspondent for The Nation. His first published essay in this role, "A Night with Palestine's Defenders of the Mountain," was shortlisted for the 2022 One World Media Print Award. RIFQA, his debut collection of poetry, was published by Haymarket Books in October 2021 was later released in Italian by Fandango Libre. RIFQA was named “a masterpiece” by The New Arab and a “remarkable debut” by the Los Angeles Review of Books, it was one of Middle East Eye’s "Best Books of 2021" and was shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prize for "Best First Collection." El-Kurd holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College (CUNY) and a BFA in Writing from Atlanta’s Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Arab American Civil Council’s “Truth in Media” Award (2022), as well as the Cultural Freedom Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation (2023). He is currently a Civic Media Fellow at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. El-Kurd has lectured and performed around the world including as the keynote for the 18th Annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Princeton University, at the Internazionale literary festival in Ferrara, Italy, and most recently at Adelaide Writers’ Week in Australia.

You can find Mohammed El-Kurd at www.mohammedelkurd.com and on Instagram and Twitter.

Micah Khater is an assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work traces how Black women experienced, theorized, and resisted biopolitical and carceral regimes in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. She is currently at work on her first book, tentatively titled Vanishing Points: Black Women, Carceral Margins, and Genealogies of Escape, which excavates the significance of post-bellum fugitivity as a window into the geographies of the evolving carceral state. Her scholarship has appeared in Southern Cultures and Disability Studies Quarterly.

Host or Publisher Black Studies Collaboratory