Akua Lezli Hope is a creator and wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, ornaments, wearables, jewelry, adornments and peace. A second generation African-Caribbean New Yorker, firstborn, she has won two Artists Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Ragdale U.S.-Africa Fellowship, a Creative Writing Fellowship from The National Endowment for The Arts, and the Walker Foundation Scholarship to Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. A Cave Canem fellow, 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 and an artists grant for Words on Wheels which delivered art and poetry cards to the frail homebound elderly during COVID. She was awarded an artist grant for her hand papermaking project NOW VOYAGER.
In 2022, she won a New York State Council on the Arts award for her project, "Afrofuturist, Pastoral, Speculative Poetry" and in 2024 she won a NYSCA grant to explore disability poetics.
Her first collection, EMBOUCHURE, Poems on Jazz and Other Musics, won the Writer’s Digest book award for poetry.
Her collection, THEM GONE, was published by WordWorks Publishing.
Her collection, OTHERWHERES, won the 2021 Elgin Award.
Her forthcoming collection, TELEPATH, will be published by Gnashing Teeth Publishing in 2026.
Akua Lezli Hope was named a Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association.
Notable publications include Revising the Psalms; The 100 Best African American Poems;Too Much Boogie, Erotic Remixes of the Dirty Blues; About Place journal, Starline, Gyroscope Review, Eye to the Telescope, Strange Horizons, Sliver Blade, Cossack Review, The Killens Review, Breath and Shadow, Stone Canoe, Three Coyotes, The Year’s Best Writing, Writer’s Digest Guide; DARK MATTER, (the first!) anthology of African American Science Fiction and Erotique Noire, the first anthology of black erotica. Her short fiction is also included in the new, celebrated, Africa Risen anthology (Tor 2022) among others. She has been published every year since 1974.
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.
She edited the record-breaking sea-themed issue of Eye To The Telescope #42 & NOMBONO: An Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators, the history-making first of its kind (Sundress Publications, 2021).
In 2020 she created The Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading Series now in its 6th year (2025) which is presented live on Facebook via Zoom, including speculative poets from across the U.S.A. and around the world.
As a crochet designer, her interest is in the freeform and the figurative -- with a collection of scifi hats. An advocate for human rights, she served as a group founder, leader, trainer of trainers, and area coordinator for Amnesty International in the 20th century.
She is an avid hand papermaker, who loves to sing, and play her soprano sax. She exhibits her artwork regularly.
A paraplegic, she’s developing a paratransit nonprofit so that she and other mobility challenged residents may get around in her small town located in the ancestral lands of the Seneca, keepers of the Western door, in the southern Finger Lakes region of New York. Akua bears an exile's desire for work close to home, and a writer's yearning for a galvanizing mythos.
