Aqua Laluah is the pen name of Gladys May Casely-Hayford, an American national born in Axim, Gold Coast (now Ghana), West Africa. Her father was a politician and lawyer, her mother a teacher. Casely-Hanford was educated in Sierra Leone and in Wales. In the 1920s she danced with a jazz band in Germany; she also began publishing poems in journals like Opportunity, Atlantic Monthly, and Philadelphia Tribune under her pseudonym. Her one collection is Take 'um so (1948). She died of black water fever in 1950.