Kamilah Aisha Moon (1973-2021) was the author of Starshine & Clay (2017), a CLMP finalist featured on NPR's "All Things Considered" as a collection that captures America in poetry, and She Has a Name (2013), a finalist for both the Audre Lorde and Lambda Literary Awards. She also wrote a non-fiction chapbook On Nascency (2015).
After attending Metro Nashville Public Schools, eventually playing volleyball and basketball in high school where she also developed a love of writing and poetry. Kamilah Aisha earned her B.A. in English at Paine College in Augusta, GA and worked at Hallmark Greeting Cards in Kansas City, MO as a writer. Her work was featured in various card collections, most notably Mahogany, their card line reflecting African American culture. She received an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and simultaneously started working in New York public schools with both the Community-Word Project and the DreamYard Project as an instructor in poetry and writing. She also taught poetry workshops on Rikers Island and was an adjunct professor at Medgar Evers College – CUNY, before eventually landing a tenure-track position at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia as an assistant professor of creative writing.
A graduate fellow of Cave Canem’s writers’ retreat, she has received Fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Prague Summer Writing Institute, Vermont Studio Center, and the Rose O’Neill Literary House. Her work has been published widely, including in the Harvard Review, Poem-A-Day, World Literature Today, The New York Times, Oxford American, Boston Review, PBS Newshour, Buzzfeed, Adroit Journal, and in Best American Poetry 2019. She was featured nationally at conferences, festivals, and universities, including the Library of Congress and Princeton University.
At MacDowell, she wrote several new poems and edited existing work for a third poetry collection. She also wrote two new essays, one of which appeared in Poetry Northwest journal.
