Akua Lezli Hope

Bio

Akua Lezli Hope has won two Artists Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1987, 2003), a Ragdale United States-Africa Fellowship (1993), and a Creative Writing Fellowship from The National Endowment For The Arts (1990). She received an Artists Crossroads grant (2003) from The Arts of the Southern Finger Lakes for her project “Words on Motion,” which places 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 in 1996. She is published in numerous literary magazines and national anthologies including: Dark Matter, Anthology of African American Science Fiction, Time Warner Books, July 2000, The Blue Light Corner, black women writing on passion, sex, and romantic love, edited by Rosemarie Robotham, Three Rivers Press, 1999; Will Work For Peace: New Political Poems, ed. by Brett Axel, Middletown, New York, 1999; Masks, Earth’s Daughters 52, 1998; Chain, 1995; Sisterfire, an anthology of Black Womanist Fiction and Poetry, edited by Charlotte Watson-Sherman, HarperPerennial, 1994; What Is Found There, Notebooks On Poetry And Politics by Adrienne Rich, W. W. Norton, 1993; Writing From The New Coast: Technique, Buffalo University, 1993; Erotique Noire, An Anthology Of Black American Erotica, Doubleday/Anchor, 1992; and Poets Marker, 1992, edited by Judson Jerome, Writers Digest Books. In 1997, she was poet-in-residence at the Chautauqua Institution where she read her poetry, lectured on jazz poetry, and conducted a workshop entitled “Writing Poetry as Mythmaking.” Born in Manhattan and raised in New York city, 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 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 the area coordinator and group founder 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. Akua has given hundreds of readings to audiences in colleges, prisons, parks, museums, and bars. She led the Voices of Fire Reading Choir from 1987 to 1999, which performed her work and that of other poets.