About Me

Akua Lezli Hope, Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry (SFPA), is a paraplegic creator & wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, & wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, sculpture, adornments & peace. She wrote her first speculative poems in the 6th grade and has been in  print since 1974 with nearly 500 poems published. Her collections include Embouchure: Poems on Jazz and Other Musics (Writer’s Digest book award winner), Them Gone, & Otherwheres: Speculative Poetry (2021 Elgin Award winner). A Cave Canem fellow, her honors include the NEA, two NYFA fellowships, Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association award & multiple Best of the Net, Rhysling, Dwarf Star & Pushcart Prize nominations. She won a 2022 New York State Council on the Arts grant to create Afrofuturist, speculative, pastoral poetry. She created the Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading series. 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). Her short fiction is included in the ground-breaking speculative anthology Dark Matter, and in the new, celebrated, Africa Risen anthology (Tor 2022) among others. She founded a paratransit nfp in her small town that needs a vehicle. She exhibits her artwork regularly, practices her soprano saxophone and dreams of access and freedom in the ancestral land of the Seneca.

Tell me about your journey to render your experience. Share words and insights. How to turn pain into power, distance into insight.