Akua Lezli Hope is a creator and wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, ornaments, wearables, jewelry, adornments and peace. A second generation African-Caribbean New Yorker, firstborn, she has won two Artists Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Ragdale U.S.-Africa Fellowship, a Creative Writing Fellowship from The National Endowment for The Arts, and the Walker Foundation Scholarship to Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. A Cave Canem fellow, 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 and an artists grant for Words on Wheels which delivered art and poetry cards to the frail homebound elderly during COVID. She was awarded an artist grant for her hand papermaking project NOW VOYAGER.

In 2022, she won a New York State Council on the Arts award for her project, "Afrofuturist, Pastoral, Speculative Poetry" and in 2024 she won a NYSCA grant to explore disability poetics.

Her first collection, EMBOUCHURE, Poems on Jazz and Other Musics, won the Writer’s Digest book award for poetry.

Her collection, THEM GONE, was published by WordWorks Publishing.

Her collection, OTHERWHERES, won the 2021 Elgin Award.

Her forthcoming collection, TELEPATH, will be published by Gnashing Teeth Publishing in 2026.

Akua Lezli Hope was named a Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association.

Notable publications include Revising the Psalms; The 100 Best African American Poems;Too Much Boogie, Erotic Remixes of the Dirty Blues; About Place journal, Starline, Gyroscope Review, Eye to the Telescope, Strange Horizons, Sliver Blade, Cossack Review, The Killens Review, Breath and Shadow, Stone Canoe, Three Coyotes, The Year’s Best Writing, Writer’s Digest Guide; DARK MATTER, (the first!) anthology of African American Science Fiction and Erotique Noire, the first anthology of black erotica. Her short fiction is also included in the new, celebrated, Africa Risen anthology (Tor 2022) among others. She has been published every year since 1974.

She led the Voices of Fire Reading Choir from 1987 to 1999, performing her work and that of other African American poets. Akua has given hundreds of readings to audiences in colleges, prisons, parks, museums, libraries and bars.

She edited the record-breaking sea-themed issue of Eye To The Telescope #42 & NOMBONO: An Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators, the history-making first of its kind (Sundress Publications, 2021).

In 2020 she created The Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading Series now in its 6th year (2025) which is presented live on Facebook via Zoom, including speculative poets from across the U.S.A. and around the world.

As a crochet designer, her interest is in the freeform and the figurative -- with a collection of scifi hats. An advocate for human rights, she served as a group founder, leader, trainer of trainers, and area coordinator for Amnesty International in the 20th century.

She is an avid hand papermaker, who loves to sing, and play her soprano sax. She exhibits her artwork regularly.

A paraplegic, she’s developing a paratransit nonprofit so that she and other mobility challenged residents may get around in her small town located in the ancestral lands of the Seneca, keepers of the Western door, in the southern Finger Lakes region of New York. Akua bears an exile's desire for work close to home, and a writer's yearning for a galvanizing mythos.

Sheree Renée Thomas is a NAACP Image Award Nominee and a New York Times-bestselling, award-winning editor, poet, and the author of three short fiction and multigenre collections, Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books, May 2020), Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press, 2016, Publishers’ Weekly Starred Review), Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems (Aqueduct Press, 2011), and Marvel's Black Panther: Panther's Rage novel (Titan Books, October 11, 2022). Her work is inspired by music, mythology, natural science, and the genius of the Mississippi Delta. She is the editor of the groundbreaking anthologies, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000, Warner Aspect/Hachette) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004, Warner Aspect/Hachette), the first to introduce W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction, which earned the 2001 and 2005 World Fantasy Awards for Year's Best Anthology, making her also the first Black author to win the award since its inception in 1975.

Sheree is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949. She also edited for Random House and for magazines like Apex, Strange Horizons, and is the Associate Editor of the historic Black Arts Movement literary journal, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, founded in 1975 by Alvin Aubert. As a fiction writer and poet, her work has been supported with fellowships and residencies from Smith College as the Lucille Geier-Lakes Writer-in-Residence, the Cave Canem Foundation, Bread Loaf Environmental, the Millay Colony of Arts, VCCA, the Wallace Foundation, the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, ArtsMemphis, and others. Widely anthologized, her work also appears in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy edited by Anne and Jeff VanderMeer, in several volumes of the Year’s Best anthologies, including the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, the Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, the Rhysling Awards, the Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction, volume 1, and in The New York Times. Sheree was honored as a 2020 World Fantasy Award Finalist for her contributions to the genre and served as a Special Guest and a co-host of the 2021 Hugo Awards Ceremony in Washington, DC with Andrea Hairston. Thomas also co-curated Carnegie Hall’s 2022 Afrofuturism Festival and served as a narrative writer and consultant on Sony PlayStation and Daimler AG/Mercedes Benz’s futurist video game, Dreams: Imagine Futures whose characters, Eshe, and the AI, Kody are based on her work.

A 2022 Hugo Award Finalist, 2022 World Fantasy Award Finalist, 2022 Ember Award Finalist, 2022 Locus Award Finalist, Ignyte Award Finalist, she is the winner of the 2022 Darrell Award for Year’s Best Novelette (“Madame & the Map: A Journey in Five Movements’ in Nine Bar Blues) and the Dal Colger Memorial Hall of Fame Award. Sheree is a collaborator with Janelle Monáe on "Timebox Altar(ed)" in the New York Times bestselling collection, The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer (Harper Voyager, April 18, 2022), and a co-editor of Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction with Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Zelda Knight (Tordotcom, November 15, 2022) and Trouble the Waters: Tales of the Deep Blue with Pan Morigan and Troy L. Wiggins (Third Man Books, January 18, 2022).

ZELDA KNIGHT is a USA Today Bestselling author of spicy and diverse sci-fi and fantasy romances. She’s also an award-winning editor (Locus, British Fantasy & World Fantasy). Zelda co-edited Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora (Crowne, 2020) and Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction (Tordotcom, 2022), which have received critical acclaim. Africa Risen was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in 2023. Her hobbies include reading books and comics, raving to the grave, and ranting about her book boyfriends.

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is an award-winning African speculative fiction writer and editor from Nigeria. He won the Nommo award for best short story by an African in 2019, the 2020 Horror Writers Association Diversity Grant, the 2020 Otherwise award and the 2021 British Fantasy award. He has been a finalist in the Nebula, Locus, BSFA, Sturgeon, and This Is Horror awards.