Atlanta poet Amena Brown blends hip-hop, jazz and comedy into spoken word artistry

July 12th, 2023

Atlanta-based spoken word poet and storyteller Amena Brown. (Courtesy of Lyric Lewin).

Our “Speaking of” series spotlights local creatives sharing their inspiration, influences, and experiences. In our continued efforts to expand the series, today we add “Speaking of Poetry” to our collection.

In this segment, Atlanta’s most prolific wordsmiths discuss the art of evoking emotions with words. For this edition of “Speaking of Poetry,” we feature spoken word poet and storyteller Amena Brown.

“If I were going to describe my style of poetry, I would say it’s as if poetry and hip-hop and jazz and monologue and comedy all merged together and made a type of performance art,” Brown says.

It was reading the works of great writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paul Robeson, James Weldon Johnson, Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni that inspired Brown’s writing. And it was her mother who pushed her to keep writing and to perform her own work.

When describing her writing process, Brown said, “Part of my writing process is learning to trust the poem and let the poem decide when it’s done with you.”

In this segment, Amena Brown shared an excerpt from her poem “Garden of Me.”

Spoken word artist and poet Amena Brown can be found on Instagram here.