Sonia Sanchez

Abstract

Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934–), was born Wilsonia Benita Driver in Birmingham, Alabama. Her mother died when she was one year old, after which she lived with her grandmother; she moved to New York City at age nine with her father, sister, and stepmother. There she wrote poetry and fiction, concealing her work because of a stutter, and learned about the history of black literature at Harlem’s Schomburg Library. She received a bachelor of arts degree in political science from Hunter College in 1955 and studied creative writing with poet Louise Bogan at New York University. After publishing her first collection of poetry, Home Coming, in 1969, she quickly gained a reputation as one of the most important voices of the Black Arts Movement. This book and We a BaddDDD People (1970) established her commitment to black nationalism; her interest in the urban settings, defiant tone, and political critiques common to the jazz elegy; and her innovative formal traits. With her first husband, Albert Sanchez, whom Sanchez married in the 1950s, she had a daughter, Anita. She married her second husband, fellow Black Arts poet Etheridge Knight, in 1968; they had twin sons, Morani and Mungu. As a member of the Nation of Islam from 1972 until 1974, Sanchez published A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1974) in celebration of the spiritual support she found there, but she left over ideological differences. The mid-1970s witnessed a shift in her poetry’s rhetoric and style. Eschewing the sometimes militant politics characteristic of her earlier work, books like I’ve Been a Woman (1978), Homegirls and Handgrenades (1984), and Under a Soprano Sky (1987) focus instead on themes of love, community, self-empowerment, and recognition for public leaders. She explores the haiku, tanka, and sonku forms and promotes blues sensibilities as a central component of African American cultural identity. Later works continue her experiments with forms, such as the epic in Does Your House Have Lions? (1997) and the haiku in Morning Haiku (2010). Sanchez joined the Temple University Department of English in 1977, where she held the Laura Carnell Chair until her retirement in 1999; she still serves as their poet-in-residence. In addition to her work as a poet, she has published seven plays and a number of essays, and she has edited two anthologies of black literature. A dynamic and performative speaker, she gives lectures and readings across the United States and in other countries, and she has fostered close connections with rap and hip-hop artists. Her life and work are the subjects of the 2015 documentary BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez. She is also committed to a variety of activist causes, including the Brandywine Peace Community, MADRE, and Plowshares. Her many awards include a PEN Writing Award, an American Book Award, the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry, the Langston Hughes Poetry Award, the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award, the Cleveland Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2021 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and the 2022 MacDowell Medal. She served as Philadelphia’s first Poet Laureate from 2012 until 2014 and remains one of the most widely celebrated and critically acknowledged American poets of all time.