Kamilah Aisha Moon

Kamilah Aisha Moon was born on September 5, 1973, in Nashville, Tennessee. She received a BA from Paine College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She authored Starshine & Clay (Four Way Books, 2017) and She Has a Name (Four Way Books, 2013), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the Audre Lorde Award from the Publishing Triangle.

D.A. Powell said of her work, “Grief and sorrow cannot prevail where there exists such sympathetic and empathetic forces as those summoned in the poems of Kamilah Aisha Moon.”

Moon’s other honors included a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center, MacDowell, the Prague Summer Writing Institute, and the Vermont Studio Center. She worked as a poet in the schools through Community-Word Project and the DreamYard Project, and taught poetry at Rikers Island and Medgar Evers College-CUNY in New York City. She then taught at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia, where she lived until her passing on September 24, 2021.