You're listening to a special archive presentation of TED Talks Daily.

This TED Talk features poet and activist, Aja Monet, and artist and cultural critic Philip Agnew, recorded live at TED Women, 2018.

Our story begins, like all great young love stories.

She slayed in my DMs.

He liked about 50 of my photos back to back in the middle of the night.

What I saw was an artist committed to truth and justice.

And she's beautiful, but I digress.

Our story actually begins across many worlds over McLuba and red wine in Palestine.

But how did we get there?

Well, I was born in Chicago, the son of a preacher and a teacher.

My ears first rung with church songs sung by my mother on Saturday mornings.

My father's south side sermon summoned me. My first words

were more notes than quotes. It was music that molded me. Later on, it was Florida A&M University

that first introduced me to organizing. In 2012, a young black male named Trayvon Martin was murdered

and it changed my life and millions of others. We were a rag-tag group of college kids and not quite adults who had decided enough was enough. Art and organizing became our answer to anger and anxiety. We built a movement and it traveled around the world and to Palestine in 2015. I was born to a single mother in the Pink House projects of Brooklyn, New York.

Maddened by survival, I gravitated inward towards books, poems, and my brothers hand me down Walkman.

I saw train station theater, sub-woofing streets and hood murals.

In high school, I found a community of metaphor, magicians,

and truth-telling poets in an organization called Urban Word NYC. Adopted by the Black

Arts Movement, I won the legendary New Yuriken Poets Cafe Grand Slam title. At Sarah Lawrence

College, I worked with artists to respond to Hurricane Katrina and the

earthquake. I discovered the impact of poetry and the ability to not just articulate our feelings,

...