Akua Lezli Hope, a Grandmaster of Fantasti Poetry (SFPA), is a creator and wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, sculpture, adornments, and peace. She wrote her first speculative poems in the sixth grade and has been in print since 1974.
She has published over 500 poems in numerous literary magazines and national anthologies, including: If, DReams and Nightmares, Unioverse Anthology Stories of the Reconvergence;Merciless Mermaids: Tails from the Deep;The Sirens Call, These ; Black Joy Unbound, These Black Bodies Are; To Ukraine, With Love, A Benefit Anthology The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2022, F(r)iction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The 100 Best African American Poems;Black Fire This Time; DARK MATTER, (the first!) anthology of African American Science Fiction; Asimov’s Science Fiction, Gyroscope, Pensive, Strange Horizons, Star*line, SciFaikuest, Eye to the Telescope, New Verse News, Breath and Shadow, The Crafty Poet II, The Cossack Review, Silver Blade, Stone Canoe, Three Coyotes; among many others.
A third generation New Yorker, her honors include the NEA, two NYFAs, an SFPA award, multiple Rhysling and Pushcart Prize nominations, among others. She twice won Rattle’s Poets Respond.
She has won grants from the New York State Council of the Arts to create AfrioFuturistic Pastoral Poetry amd in 2024 to create and explore Disability Poetics.
Her first collection, EMBOUCHURE, Poems on Jazz and Other Musics, won the Writer’s Digest book award. A Cave Canem fellow, her collection, THEM GONE, was published 2018. Her chapbook Otherwheres, won the Elgin award.
She won She launched Speculative Sundays, an online poetry reading series which has presented over 30 speculative poets, live on Facebook via Zoom.
She won editorship of NOMBONO, the first anthology of BIPOC speculative poems published fall 2021 by Sundress Publications. She edited the largest issue of Eye To The Telescope on the sea. Her micro chapbook of scifaiku, Stratospherics, is in the Quarantine Public Library.
An avid hand papermaker and crochet designer with over 130 patterns published, she exhibits her artwork regularly.
She sings songs from her favorite anime in Japanese, practices her soprano saxophone and prays for the cessation of suffering for all sentience from the ancestral land of the Seneca, the Southern Finger Lakes region of New York State.