Akua Lezli Hope

A third-generation New Yorker, firstborn Akua Lezli Hope has won two artists fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Ragdale US–Africa Fellowship, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. Her poetry collection, THEM GONE, was published by The Word Works, December 2018. 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 anthologies, including Strange Horizons, 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), Dark Matter (the first anthology of African American science fiction), Obsidian II, Hambone, African American Review, Catalyst, and Contact II. She holds a BA in psychology from Williams College, an MBA in marketing from Columbia University, and a MSJ in broadcast journalism from Columbia University.