Hello, fellow travelers!
Thank you all again for your nominations for this year’s Hugo Awards! Yes, I am going to keep thanking you the entire time—your commitment to reading widely in this field of ours has a chance to make the 2025 Special Hugo Award for Best Poem a true revolution in the history of the awards. While the awards administration team is doing their part, we should keep acquainting ourselves with some of the standout poets in this wonderful genre, so this week we’re chatting with SFPA Grand Master Akua Lezli Hope!
Akua Lezli Hope, a Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry (SFPA), wisdom seeker, and paraplegic creator of poems, patterns, stories, music, and sculpture, has been in print since 1974 with over 500 poems published. Her collections include Embouchure: Poems on Jazz and Other Musics (Writer’s Digest Book Award), THEM GONE, and Otherwheres: Speculative Poetry (Elgin Award). Her honors include NEA & NYFA fellowships; SFPA, Rhysling, CRITTER & IGNYTE awards; and NYSCA grants. She created the ongoing Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading Series and edited NOMBONO: An Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators, the first of its kind. Her collection, TELEPATH, will be published by Gnashing Teeth Publishing in 2026. Find her at SpeculativePoetry.com, AkuaLezliHope.com, and DisabilityPoetics.com.
How did you get into writing speculative poetry?
A confluence of marvelous and magical circumstances: Culture, location, [and] immigration conspired to create how speculative poetry connects intrinsically and indelibly to me and how I got into writing speculative poetry.
The first born of the second generation of West Indian (Caribbean) immigrants who all settled in Harlem, New York City, I was the beneficiary of a lot of cultural input and multicultural experiences. Stories, plays, music, museums, [and] creating; reading was encouraged, supported and affirmed. The speculative was part of the warp and woof of our being. Poetry was read, shared, and recited. My father was a student of Countee Cullen, who lived in his building. My childhood home had bookshelves of my parents’ books and three encyclopedias for us. I began writing poetry before I could write, dictating them to my willing mother.
At 12, I was gifted with my own subscription to Analog magazine. At 12, I took my first solo airplane ride, wrote my first two speculative poems, and took my second flight with my grandfather to Jamaica, West Indies, and saw the mist rising up the Blue Mountains. At 12, everything came into focus: the existential threat of nuclear annihilation, the role of empire in driving all four grandparents to the United States, [and] the language-breaking and language-making legerdemain of “Jabberwocky.” In the fourth grade I read Animal Farm, in the fifth, 1984, and in sixth grade I was granted permission to read Brave New World.
In high school, my beloved French teacher, a self-described Moroccan Jew, introduced me to the poets of Négritude. My favorite was Aimé Césaire. These anticolonial and surrealist poets inspired the Black Arts Movement. In recent years I found the source blood of Jean Joseph Rabiarevelo, whose African surrealist verse (circa the ’30s! kissing a Martian) is stunningly modern and speculative. We read, of course, Poe and Dickinson in elementary school, foundational in infusing the speculative in my life. Home held Gwendolyn Brooks and Countee Cullen and other African-American poets on the bookshelves, too, and once started I never stopped.
I joined the SFPA circa 1983, learning about it at a SF/comic bookstore, called Forbidden Planet, which was down the block from the Strand in NYC where an old poet boyfriend worked. I left the SFPA and wandered in the wilderness until the 21st century, when I rejoined the organization.
The speculative was in our childhood rhymes and hand-clap games. The speculative was in my father’s gloriously illustrated mythic fairytale children’s books from the ’20s. The speculative was in our music. My father loved jazz and my mother opera; both hold grand speculative imaginings. In grad school, as a jazz dj I got to meet and talk to SunRa who wrote speculative poetry, as well as evoked the extraterrestrial in his music. In college, there were the Parliament Funkadelics, whom we met and hung out with (dancing to tasting “the maggots in the mind of the universe”).
My family watched Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, and the original Outer Limits, altogether piled on the couch and on the floor in front of the black-and-white television. Science fiction, poetry, and the speculative are part of my lived cultural zeitgeist, my youth and development with those imprinted inputs; the output is speculative poetry.
What do you enjoy about speculative poetry?
Everything! I enjoy reading speculative poetry, creating it, and thinking about it. I enjoy engaging, employing, and exploring the infinite array of possibilities of existence and non-existence. I love speculative poetry’s freedoms and its challenges: to wrestle with the poetic endeavor to articulate what is not said, and to bring into awareness a new understanding of experience or a deeper understanding of experience.
Yet the speculative also engages in the what-if, what might be, and the what else.
Just now it’s midnight, and I heard the close honking of geese: so amazing and such a strange time to hear them flying over my house. I heard them because I turned the TV off to answer this question. One speculative approach could say the honking was a channeling and an affirmation, and another speculative approach could say that the honking was a robo geese and a warning that the rogue regime was coming, and another speculative approach could say that the sound wasn’t geese at all, that I was actually slipping between realities and those were aliens because I’m living in a place/time/space without things that fly. I’m thinking about this as scifaiku, maybe horror haiku, in piercing the moment in my poetic quest to render reality and communicate what I uncover/discover/come to understand or don’t.
As I strive to be more intersectional in my creative endeavors, I’ve used my hand papermaking skills to make art books for my speculative poetry. I’ve inscribed/embossed handmade paper with speculative poems. My speculative poetry has encouraged me to make other visual artworks and sculptures, inspired and informed by my poetry. My freeform crochet has included works made for speculative poems and speculative poems made for works (and I’ve designed a series of sci-fi hats, though not for specpo). My last sculptural series are cement portals for which there are speculative poems. I enjoy that the speculative poetry calls me and reminds me to stretch. I’m holding a speculative poetry postcard swap that any may join, requiring folks to create and send speculative poetry postcards (info at SpeculativePoetry.com).
You are the regular host of the Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading Series online. What is the value you see in audiences hearing poetry being read?
I created the Speculative Sundays poetry reading series in 2020 after being inspired by ConZealand, my first con. The connectedness and exchange that the online platform enabled, the sheer beauty and excitement of it, touched me deeply and thrilled me. I realized that there was not an ongoing presentation by the living creators of speculative poetry. Now in [its] sixth year, I’ve presented over 40 events with close to 60 poet-presentations. I put it that way because some people have been repeats.
The first human recorded literature was speculative poetry, and it comes from the oral. The oral tradition is our human tradition, so I believe that poetry should be read aloud and shared. This harks back to our ancient gatherings around the hearth or the fire in the long house or the tavern or the tent.
We should do this with regularity to connect to each other with some proximal immediacy and even invite new audiences. Technology makes this possible, enables me to invite speculative poets from around the world (yay!) and listener viewers from around the world (!!!).
I’m very grateful to have found funding over the years for the series so that the poets are paid for their presentations and the access is kept free and presented on multiple platforms. Thank you to Poets & Writers, The Arts Council of the Southern Finger Lakes, and the New York State Council on the Arts for enabling this endeavor. Most of the recordings are available for watching, though not all because my ambition and vision outstrips my disabled capacity. At some point in time I’d love to have this archive protected, especially in an era when history is being willfully erased.
As an SFPA Grand Master, how would you say the art and culture of speculative poetry has evolved over the years?
Another “how” question!
Speculative poetry has evolved in many ways:
in the ever growing number of publications,
in the number of people engaged in creating it,
in its many genres or sub genres,
in the growth of horror and dark poetry,
in the growth of astro poetry,
in the growth of long narrative novels in verse,
in the evolution of scifaiku, [and]
in the growing appreciation of its world wide and culture spanning roots.
There is an embarrassment of riches evidenced by the ever-growing list of Rhysling nominees and Elgin nominees for both chapbooks and full-length collections.
And there is the existence of those who don’t don the hat or wear the button pin on their lapel proclaiming speculative poetry whose award-winning and noted works nonetheless occupy the speculative poetic space.
What is your favourite poem you’ve read recently?
I’ve read far too many to name just one. The SFPA recently concluded reading and assessing last year’s bounty of speculative poetry to nominate poems for the 2025 Rhysling awards. And at this moment we are in the midst of reading another wealth of speculative poetry as Elgin Nomination Season is upon us. So I am loathe, in this forum, to name any single work, especially when I think of what I say to introduce the Speculative Sundays Reading Series in part: “Speculative poetry includes alternate history, astropoetry, cryptids, cyberfunk, cyberpunk, dystopian, fabulism, fairy tales, fantasy, folklore, futurism, horror, magic, monsters, mythology, occult, paranormal, robots, science fiction, shifters, slipstream, solar punk, solar funk, space opera, superheroes, supernatural, sword and sorcery, sword and soul, steamfunk, steampunk, time travel, post-apocalyptic, and weird. It takes all poetic forms plus one of its own, called scifaiku.”
I want to answer a question you didn’t ask—what else would I like to see and what’s new to me. New to me is romantasy in speculative poetry—I would love to read an anthology of romantasy. And what else: a children’s book of speculative verse—so that there’s something other than more than The Space Child’s Mother Goose (I misremember something like, “Probable-Possible, my black hen/She lays eggs in the Relative When/She doesn’t lay them in the Relative Now/Because she’s unable to Postulate how”), and my dear droogies, that was published in 1956, my childhood, just so you know).
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Listen to Akua’s poem “First Contact Translator”.
That’s all for this week!
As you all may have seen by now, the finalists for this year’s Hugo Awards are now live! I hope you’ve already taken the time in the past week to undertake your first reading of any poems you aren’t already familiar with. You are in no rush to have strong feelings about them yet—we still have a few weeks left before voting closes—but now is always a good time to at least get a sense of how each poem initially moves you!
Until next time, may tomorrow and your good days always rhyme!
Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist, and tabletop game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions and the 2020 Ignyte Award for best in speculative poetry, and has been published in many genre magazines and collections. He is the former poetry editor of FIYAH. His debut poetry collection, Can You Sign My Tentacle?, available from Interstellar Flight Press, is the winner of the 2022 Elgin Award. He is the poet laureate for Seattle Worldcon 2025, and the first poet laureate of any Worldcon.