Akua Lezli Hope- Instructor Bios

Akua Lezli Hope

Akua Lezli Hope 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 received an Artists Crossroads grant from The Arts of the Southern Finger Lakes for her project "Words in 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. She is published in numerous literary magazines and national anthologies including: The Year's Best Writing, Writers Digest Guides; Moon Journal; DARK MATTER, the first anthology of African American Science Fiction THE BLUE LIGHT CORNER, black women writing on passion, sex, and romantic love, Three Rivers Press, 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 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.