LITERARY RESUMé
A third generation African-Caribbean New Yorker, firstborn, wisdom seeker, creator, and paraplegic, Akua Lezli Hope has won a Creative Writing Fellowship from The National Endowment for The Arts, two Artists Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Ragdale U.S.-Africa Fellowship, and three artist grants from the New York State Council on the Arts.
In 2022 she was named Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). She has won scholarships for the Hurston Wright writers’ program and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She is a Cave Canem fellow.
Her art and poetry card project, Words on Wheels, which delivered them to the homebound elderly, won an Artists Grant. She received an Artists Crossroads Grant from The Arts of the Southern Finger Lakes for her project “Words in Motion,” which placed poetry on the buses of New York’s Chemung and Steuben counties.
Her first collection, EMBOUCHURE, Poems on Jazz and Other Musics, won the Writer’s Digest book award for poetry. Her collection, Them Gone, a finalist in the Word Works Washington Prize competition, was published in 2018 by The Word Works. Her speculative poetry chapbook, Otherwheres, won the 2021 Elgin award.
She has received multiple Best of the Net, Rhysling, and Dwarf Star nominations Her poems, Montserrat and Awaiting Your Return (for Jamal Kashoggi) were nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. Her poem “Metis Emits” won a Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association’s short poem award. She has twice won Rattle’s Poet’s Respond. Her poem, “Giant Robot and his Person” won the 27th Annual Critters Readers' Poll Best Poem. Her poem, “My mother, she ate me”won the 2024 IGNYTE Award for Best Poem. Her poem, Igbo Landing II, won a Rhysling Long Poem Award.
She created and has hosted the renowned Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading Series from 2020 to date.
She created the historic, groundbreaking, first anthology of BIPOC speculative poetry, NOMBONO, published by Sundress Publications, and edited the largest ever issue of Eye to the Telescope, on The Sea.
She has been in print since 1974 with over 500 poems published in numerous literary magazines and national anthologies including: Bestiary of Blood, Black Joy Unbound, Black Fire this Time (2022), Wreaths for a Wayfarer: An Anthology in Honour of Pius Adesanmi, Eccentric Orbits Volume 2, Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks, The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop, Too Much Boogie, Erotic Remixes of the Dirty Blues, The 100 Best African American Poems, The Year’s Best Writing, Writer’s Digest Guides; THE BLUELIGHT CORNER, black women writing on passion, sex, and romantic love; Will Work For Peace: New Political Poems; SISTERFIRE, an anthology of Black Womanist Fiction and Poetry, ed. by Charlotte Watson-Sherman; WHAT IS FOUND THERE, NOTEBOOKS ON POETRY AND POLITICS by Adrienne Rich, W.W. Norton; WRITING FROM THE NEW COAST: TECHNIQUE, Buffalo University; EROTIQUE NOIRE, (the first!) AN ANTHOLOGY OF BLACK EROTICA, Doubleday/Anchor; POETS MARKET, ed. by Judson Jerome, Writers Digest Books; CONFIRMATION, an anthology of Afrikan American Women Writers; EXTENDED OUTLOOKS, the Iowa Review Collection of Contemporary Women Writers; Nature Triumphs Anthology, Space Funk anthology, 50 over 50, About Place Journal, African American Review, Blue Cage (England),Breath and Shadow, Catalyst, Catalyst, CHAIN, Contact II, Dreams and Nightmares, Earth's Daughters 52, Eye to the Telescope, Eyeball, Faerie Magazine, Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, Gramarye, Hambone II, Iron Horse Review, Killens Review, Lockjaw Magazine, MASKS, Minerva Rising, New Verse News, Obsidian II, Pensive Journal, Penumbra, Poets Reading the News, Raising Mothers Magazine, Rattle, Scifaikuest, Silver Blade, SpecPoVerse, Sublimation, synkroniciti, SoFi (Sociological Fiction), Star*line, Stone Canoe, Strange Horizons, The Cossack Review, The Crafty Poet II, Three Coyotes, Tiny Text, among many others.
She was a finalist in the Open Voice competition, in the Barnard New Women Poets Series with her manuscript Fuel for Beginners, and in the MacDonald's Black literary competition. Her collection, The Prize is the Journey, was a finalist in the Walt Whitman contest.
UNPACKING, her collaboration with dancer choreographer, Lois Welk, was presented in 2003 at 171 Cedar Arts Center. She was a poet-in-residence at the Chautauqua Institute where she read her poetry, lectured on jazz poetry, and conducted a workshop entitled “Writing Poetry as Mythmaking.”
Akua also writes speculative short fiction which has been included in: Afrofuturism Anthology (Flametree), Africa Risen (Tor), For Those Who Deserve to Exist (Inked in Gray Press, 2022), Open Minds, (Shreyer) and DARK MATTER, (the first!) anthology of African American Science Fiction, (Time Warner Books).
She holds a B.A. in psychology from Williams College, a M.B.A. in marketing from Columbia University Graduate School of Business, and a M.S.J. in broadcast journalism from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Her collection of senryu, Our 50th, (ArtFarm Press), commemorates her experience as being among the first class including women at Williams College.
She was a founding section leader in the Poetry Forum on Compuserve. She served as a founding section leader of African American Resource Forum and in the Books and Writers section of the African American Culture Forum (American Visions) on Compuserve. She also served as a trainer, area coordinator, and group founder and leader for Amnesty International, U.S.A., in the southern tier of New York. She co-authored a biweekly column on social, political, and cultural issues for the Star Gazette.
She is a founding member of the Black Writers Union and the New Renaissance Writers Guild whose alumni include Arthur Flowers, Walter Dean Myers and Terri McMillan.
She led the Voices of Fire Reading Choir from 1987 to 1999, performing her work and that of other African American poets. Akua has given hundreds of readings to audiences in colleges, prisons, parks, museums, libraries and bars.
Akua founded a paratransit nonprofit, awaiting a vehicle, to provide transportation for the wheelchair bound in her tiny town.
Akua also creates sculpture, objects, and jewelry in glass, fiber, metal, concrete and handmade paper; has published over 130 crochet patterns; plays the soprano saxophone; sings animé tunes in Japanese; and prays for the end of suffering for all sentience.