Akua Lezli Hope
Akua Lezli Hope is an African-American woman artist, poet and writer. A third-generation New Yorker, she was born in Manhattan and grew up in the South Bronx and Queens. She has degrees from Williams College and Columbia University in psychology, journalism and business. Akua is a talented woman with diverse interests including music. She also sings and plays the saxophone.
Artist
She has twice won an Artists Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1987, 2003). Her speciality is hand paper-making. Akua Lezli Hope also creates sculpture, objects and jewelry in glass and paper. In glass she fuses, casts and flameworks.
Poet
Her collection, Embouchure, Poems on Jazz and Other Musics, was published by ArtFarm Press in 1995. It won the Writer's Digest 1995 poetry book award. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and in several anthologies, including:
- Sisterfire, an anthology of Black Womanist fiction and poetry (HarperPerennial)
- Erotique Noire/Black Erotica (Doubleday/Anchor)
- Confirmation, an anthology of African-American women writers (Quill/Morrow).
She is a founding member of the Black Writers Union and the New Renaissance Writers Guild. She is an Area Coordinator for Amnesty International.
Writer
Hope won a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as a Ragdale U. S. - Africa Fellowship. She has given over 100 readings to audiences in colleges, prisons, parks, museums, restaurants and bars. She is a founding member of the Black Writers Union and the New Renaissance Writers Guild whose alumni include Baron James Ashanti, Doris Jean Austin, Arthur Flowers and Terry McMillan (Waiting to Exhale, How Stella Got Her Groove Back).
A lifelong science fiction enthusiast, her sf poetry was published in Asimov's science fiction magazine. Her story, The Becoming is included in Dark Matter: The Anthology of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction by Black Writers— named a New York Times notable book, because it was the first anthology of science fiction and fantasy by Black Writers.
Akua was the Area Coordinator for Amnesty International USA in the Southern Tier of New York and also served on Amnesty's Cultural Diversity Resource Group. She served as a staff member of the African American Resource Forum and was Section Leader of the Books and Writers section in the African American Culture Forum and of the African American Verse section in the Poetry Forum on Compuserve Information Service.
Health
In 2005 she was stricken with transverse myelitis, a rare idiopathic auto-immune disease, and became a paraplegic.