Akua Lezli Hope

A third generation New Yorker, firstborn, Akua Lezli Hope @akualezlihope 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 won a grant from The Arts Council of the Southern Finger Lakes for her project, Words on Wheels, creating poetry art cards for the frail elderly. 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 Festival. UNPACKING, her collaboration with dancer choreographer, Lois Welk, was performed 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.”

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.

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; designs crochet patterns, plays with her cat and the saxophone, sings, and makes good manifest.