Akua Naru

Akua Naru is a hip hop artist, poet, producer, playright, performer, and Assistant Professor of Hip Hop at the University of California, Santa Cruz. With classic boom bap hip hop sounds, socially conscious rhymes, and jazz-soul elements, Naru has garnered attention and accumulated rave reviews.

Akua Naru and her band have a reputation for captivating audiences and inspiring many. Her music and performances are a testament to the legacy of soul music and the powerful trailblazing female artist tradition on which it builds: hip-hop's spectacular global, poetic, intellectual, spiritual, political, feminist blend.  

WIth the release of her debut album ...The Journey Aflame (Jakarta Records, 2011), Naru established herself as a model for what women can be in hip hop. The album was deemed a classic hip hop contribution by critics from New York to Moscow. Placing at number one on the US college radio charts, with the JR & PH7-produced single "The World Is Listening" in rotation on various national radio stations in France and Germany and appearing in record stores from Paris to Tokyo, ...The Journey Aflame proved to do just that; make the world listen.

Akua's third album, The Blackest Joy (The Urban Era, 2018) was the product of a transition in her life; she had been thinking about the lives of slaves and was disheartened by “these videos as they’re being posted online” demonstrating the discrimination and oppression today, 400 years after slavery ended. With The Blackest Joy, she reflects on black joy “as a form of resistance, as a political act, as a force in and of itself.” 

In 2024, she released All About Love: New Visions (The Urban Era). The project is both inspired by and an ode to the late Black feminist icon Bell Hooks and her classic text All About Love, which examines society and its ideals of love.

Naru's birth name is LaTanya Olatunji. She was born in New Haven, Connecticut.

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