Bio:Akua Lezli Hope

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A third generation New Yorker, firstborn, Akua Lezli Hope has won two Artists Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts , a Ragdale U.S.-Africa Fellowship, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from The National Endowment for The Arts . She’s won scholarships for the Hurston Wright writers program and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She is 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. She was the guest poet at the Steele Memorial Library's 2003 Festival. 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.”

Her manuscript, Them Gone, a finalist in the 2015 Word Works Washington Prize competition, was selected for Red Paint Hill Publishing’s Bryant Lysembee Editor’s Prize and will be published in 2016. Her poem “Metis Emits” won the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s short poem award for 2015. Her first collection, EMBOUCHURE, Poems on Jazz and Other Musics, won the Writer’s Digest book award for poetry.

She is published in numerous literary magazines and national anthologies including: Eye to the Telescope, Breath and Shadow, The Crafty Poet II, The Cossack Review, Silver Blade, Tiny Text, The 100 Best African American Poems (2010); Killens Review, Breath and Shadow, Stone Canoe, Three Coyotes, The Year’s Best Writing, Writer’s Digest Guides, 2003; DARK MATTER, (the first!) anthology of African American Science Fiction, Time Warner Books, 2000; among many others.

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. She is a founding section leader in the Poetry Forum 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 in 1995.

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 bears an exile's desire for work close to home, and a writer's yearning for a galvanizing mythos. She also creates sculpture, objects, and jewelry in glass, metal and paper; design crochet patterns, plays with her cat and the saxophone, sings, and makes good manifest.

Awards and Honors Iron Horse Review, Photofinish contest winner, 2016. Being Here, semifinalist, Quills Edge Press Red Paint Hill Publishing Bryant-Lysembee Editor’s Prize for Them Gone, 2015 Short Poem Winner, Science Fiction Poetry Association, 2015 Finalist, Washington Prize Word Works Poetry Competition, 2015 Walker Foundation Scholarship to Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, 2005 Cave Canem Fellow, 2002-2004 Two Voices/Two Pages Winner Geva Theater 2004 New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, 2003 Artists Crossroads Grant for Words in Motion, 2003 Awardee in the Nonrhyming Poetry Writer's Digest annual competition, 2002 Honorable Mention, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (2000) edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling: for "The Becoming" (DARK MATTER) Artist-in-Residence, Women’s Studio Workshop, 2001 Fellowship, Hurston-Wright Writers’ Week, 2001 Poet-in-Residence, Chautauqua Institution, 1997 Writer's Digest Book Awards, 1996 Ragdale U.S.–Africa Fellowship, 1993 The International Who's Who in Poetry Finalist, 1991 Open Voice competition National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, 1990 Finalist, Barnard New Women Poets Series -1990 Finalist, MacDonald's Black Literary Achievement Award, 1989 The International Authors and Writers Who's Who New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, 1987 Two Thousand Notable American Women Who's Who in U.S. Writers, Editors, and Poets