Telepath

A third generation New Yorker, firstborn, 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's won scholarships for the Hurston Wright writers' program and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. A Cave Canem fellow, she has been in print since 1974 with over 500 poems published.Her first collection, EMBOUCHURE, Poems on Jazz and Other Musics, won the Writer's Digest book award for poetry. Her poems, Montserrat and Awaiting Your Return (for Jamal Kashoggi) were nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. Her book, Them Gone, a finalist in the 2015 Word Works Washington Prize competition, was selected for Red Paint Hill Publishing's Bryant Lysembee Editor's Prize and published in 2018 by The Word Works. Her speculative poetry chapbook, Otherwheres, won the 2021 Elgin Award.Her poem, They Are Swimmers, was nominated for a 2021 Best of the Net by Rising Mothers.Her poem, Metis Emits, won the Science Fiction Poetry Association's short poem award for 2015. Her poem, Endangered, which won Rattle's Poet's Respond (2016) was used as text for Europe's Duo Lied Competition's song.She is published in numerous literary magazines and national anthologies including: Tales of the Reconvergence, Unioverse; Africa Rising; Black Fire This Time, Black Joy, Wreaths for a Wayfarer: An Anthology in Honour of Pius Adesanmi, Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks, The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop, Too Much Boogie, Erotic Remixes of the Dirty Blues, Star*Line, Scifaikuest, Panoply magazine, SoFi, Faerie Magazine, Iron Horse Review, Lockjaw Magazine, Penumbra, About Place Journal, Poets Reading the News, New Verse News, Scifaikuest, Starline, Eye to the Telescope, 50 over 50, Minerva Rising, Strange Horizons, Rattle, Breath and Shadow, The Crafty Poet II, The Cossack Review, Silver Blade, Tiny Text, The 100 Best African American Poems (2010); among many others.She also creates sculpture, objects, and jewelry in glass, metal and handmade paper. She exhibits her art work regularly. She has published over 130 crochet patterns. Founder of a paratransit nonprofit, she plays the soprano saxophone, sings her favorite anime songs in Japanese, makes good manifest, and prays for the end of suffering for all sentience.