Akua Lezli Hope is a creator and wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, sculpture, adornments, peace and change. She wrote her first speculative poems in the sixth grade and has been in print every year since 1974. She is published in numerous literary magazines and national anthologies, including the ground-breaking firsts Dark Matter, Erotique Noire and Keeping the Faith. A third generation, African Caribbean New Yorker, her honors include the National Endowment of the Arts fellowship, two New York Foundation of the Arts fellowships, a SFPA award, several Best of the Net, Rhysling and Pushcart Prize nominations, among other scholarships and grants. She twice won Rattle’s Poets Respond. Her first collection, EMBOUCHURE, Poems on Jazz and Other Musics, won the Writer’s Digest book award. A Cave Canem fellow, her collection, THEM GONE, was published 2018. She launched Speculative Sundays, an online poetry reading series in 2020. She won editorship of NOMBONO, an anthology of speculative poems by BIPOC creators, a historic first, (Sundress Publications, 2021). She is editor of history-making largest Eye to the Telescope #42, The Sea (SFPA, 2021). Her micro chapbook of scifaiku, Stratospherics, is in the Quarantine Public Library. A paraplegic, she founded a paratransit nonprofit. Her chapbook, Otherwheres (ArtFarm Press) won the 2021 Elgin award. An avid hand papermaker and crochet designer with over 130 patterns published, she exhibits her artwork regularly. She sings songs from her favorite anime in Japanese, practices her soprano saxophone, and prays for the cessation of suffering for all sentience.