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Sonia Sanchez

b. 1934
http://www.soniasanchez.net
Headshot of poet Sonia Sanchez
Photo courtesy of the poet

Sonia Sanchez was born in 1934 in Birmingham, Alabama. She earned her BA in political science from Hunter College in 1955, did postgraduate work at New York University, and studied poetry under the mentorship of poet Louise Bogan.

Sanchez is the author of more than 20 books, including Homecoming (1969), We a BaddDDD People (1970), Love Poems (1973), I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1978), A Sound Investment (1980), Homegirls and Handgrenades (1984), Under a Soprano Sky (1987), Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995), Does Your House Have Lions? (1997), Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (1998), Shake Loose My Skin (1999), Morning Haiku (2010), and, most recently, Collected Poems (2021). In addition to being a contributing editor to Black Scholar and The Journal of African Studies, she has edited an anthology, We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans (1973).

Sanchez is a recipient of the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Does Your House Have Lions? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Sanchez is the Poetry Society of America’s 2001 Robert Frost Medalist and a Ford Freedom Scholar from the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. She was one of 20 African American women featured in Freedom’s Sisters, an interactive exhibition created by the Cincinnati Museum Center and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, which toured from 2008 to 2012, displaying key historical figures who fought for equality for all Americans. In December 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter selected Sonia Sanchez as Philadelphia’s first poet laureate, calling her “the longtime conscience of the city.” BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez, a documentary about Sanchez’s life as an artist and activist by Barbara Attie, Janet Goldwater, and Sabrina Schmidt Gordon, was nominated for a 2017 Emmy. Sanchez’s poetry was featured in the movie Love Jones. Her work is also explored and studied in BMA: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review, the first African American journal that discusses her work and contributions to the Black Arts Movement.

Sanchez was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University and held the Laura Carnell Chair in English at Temple. Awards and honors include the 2004 Harper Lee Award, an Alabama Distinguished Writer, the 2005 Leeway Foundation Transformational Award, the National Visionary Leadership Award for 2006, the 2009 Robert Creeley Award, the 2016 Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Wallace Stevens Award in 2018 presented by the Academy of American Poets, the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019, the 2021 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, the 2022 Edward MacDowell Medal, the 2022 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award (also administered by Poets & Writers), and the 2022 Jackson Poetry Prize, an $80,000 prize awarded annually by Poets & Writers. 

Sanchez has lectured at more than 500 universities and colleges in the United States and has traveled extensively, reading her poetry in Africa, Cuba, England, the Caribbean, Australia, Europe, Nicaragua, the People’s Republic of China, Norway, and Canada. 

She lives in Philadelphia.

Poems by Sonia Sanchez
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Bibliography

POETRY
 

  • Homecoming, Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1969.
  • We a BaddDDD People, with foreword by Dudley Randall, Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1970.
  • Ima Talken Bout the Nation of Islam, TruthDel, 1972.
  • Love Poems, Third Press (New York, NY), 1973.
  • A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women, Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1973.
  • I’ve Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems, Black Scholar Press (Sausalito, CA), 1978.
  • homegirls and handgrenades, Thunder’s Mouth Press (New York, NY), 1984.
  • Under a Soprano Sky, Africa World (Trenton, NJ), 1987.
  • Continuous fire: A Collection of Poetry, Inkbook, 1994.
  • Autumn Blues: New Poems, XX, 1994.
  • Wounded in the House of a Friend, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1995.
  • Does Your House Have Lions?, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1997.
  • Like the Singing Coming off the Drums: Love Poems, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1998.
  • Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1999.
  • Homegirls and Handgrenades, White Pine Press, 2007.
  • Morning Haiku, Beacon Press, 2010.

FOR CHILDREN

  • It’s a New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs, Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1971.
  • The Adventures of Fat Head, Small Head, and Square Head, illustrated by Taiwo DuVall, Third Press (New York, NY), 1973.
  • A Sound Investment and Other Stories, Third World Press, 1979.

PLAYS

  • The Bronx Is Next, first produced in New York, NY, at Theatre Black, October 3, 1970 (included in Cavalcade: Negro American Writing from 1760 to the Present, edited by Arthur Davis and Saunders Redding, Houghton [Boston, MA], 1971 ).
  • Sister Son/ji, first produced with Cop and Blow and Players Inn by Neil Harris and Gettin’ It Together by Richard Wesley as Black Visions, Off-Broadway at New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theatre, 1972 (included in New Plays From the Black Theatre, edited by Ed Bullins, Bantam [New York, NY], 1969).
  • Uh Huh; But How Do It Free Us?, first produced in Chicago, IL, at Northwestern University Theater, 1975 (included in The New Lafayette Theatre Presents: Plays with Aesthetic Comments by Six Black Playwrights, Ed Bullins, J. E. Gaines, Clay Gross, Oyamo, Sonia Sanchez, Richard Wesley, edited by Bullins, Anchor Press [Garden City, NY], 1974).
  • Malcolm Man/Don’t Live Here No More, first produced in Philadelphia, PA, at ASCOM Community Center, 1979.
  • I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t, first produced in Atlanta, GA, at OIC Theatre, April 23, 1982.
  • I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t and Other Plays, Duke University Press, 2010.

EDITOR

  • (Editor) Three Hundred and Sixty Degrees of Blackness Comin’ at You (poetry), 5X Publishing Co., 1971.
  • (Editor and contributor) We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans, Bantam (New York, NY), 1973.
  • (Compiler and author of introduction) Allison Funk, Living at the Epicenter: The 1995 Morse Poetry Prize, Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 1995.

PROSE

  • Crisis in Culture—Two Speeches by Sonia Sanchez, Black Liberation Press, 1983.
  • Conversations with Sonia Sanchez, University Press of Mississippi, 2007.

 

Also author of Dirty Hearts, 1972.

CONTRIBUTOR TO ANTHOLOGIES

  • Robert Giammanco, editor, Poetro Negro (title means “Black Power”), Giu, Laterza & Figli, 1968.
  • Le Roi Jones and Ray Neal, editors, Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, Morrow (New York, NY), 1968.
  • Dudley Randall and Margaret G. Burroughs, editors, For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X, Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1968.
  • Walter Lowenfels, editor, The Writing on the Wall: One Hundred Eight American Poems of Protest, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1969.
  • Arnold Adoff, editor, Black Out Loud: An Anthology of Modern Poems by Black Americans, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1970.
  • Walter Lowenfels, editor, In a Time of Revolution: Poems from Our Third World, Random House (New York, NY), 1970.
  • June M. Jordan, editor, Soulscript, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1970.
  • Gwendolyn Brooks, editor, A Broadside Treasury, Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1971.
  • Dudley Randall, editor, Black Poets, Bantam (New York, NY), 1971.
  • Orde Coombs, editor, We Speak as Liberators: Young Black Poets, Dodd (New York, NY), 1971.
  • Bernard W. Bell, editor, Modern and Contemporary Afro-American Poetry, Allyn & Bacon (Boston, MA), 1972.
  • Arnold Adoff, editor, The Poetry of Black America: An Anthology of the 20th Century, Harper (New York, NY), 1973.
  • JoAn and William M. Chace, Making It New, Canfield Press (San Francisco, CA), 1973.
  • Donald B. Gibson, editor, Modern Black Poets, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1973.
  • Stephen Henderson, editor, Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References, Morrow (New York, NY), 1973.
  • J. Paul Hunter, editor, Norton Introduction to Literature: Poetry, Norton (New York, NY), 1973.
  • James Schevill, editor, Breakout: In Search of New Theatrical Environments, Swallow Press, 1973.
  • Lucille Iverson and Kathryn Ruby, editors, We Become New: Poems by Contemporary Women, Bantam (New York, NY), 1975.
  • Quincy Troupe and Rainer Schulte, editors, Giant Talk: An Anthology of Third World Writings, Random House (New York, NY), 1975.
  • Henry B. Chapin, editor, Sports in Literature, McKay (New York, NY), 1976.
  • Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, editors, Understanding Poetry, Holt (New York, NY), 1976.
  • Ann Reit, editor, Alone amid All the Noise, Four Winds/Scholastic (New York, NY), 1976.
  • Erlene Stetson, editor, Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women, 1746-1980, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1981.
  • Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka, editors, Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women, Morrow (New York, NY), 1983.
  • Burney Hollis, editor, Swords upon This Hill, Morgan State University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1984.
  • (Contributor) Mari Evans, editor, Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, introduced by Stephen Henderson, Doubleday-Anchor (Garden City, NY), 1984.
  • Jerome Rothenberg, editor, Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1985.
  • Marge Piercy, editor, Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now, Pandora (New York, NY), 1987.

Poems also included in Night Comes Softly, Black Arts, To Gwen with Love, New Black Voices, Blackspirits, The New Black Poetry, A Rock against the Wind, America: A Prophecy, Nommo, Black Culture, and Natural Process.

OTHER

  • Author of column for American Poetry Review, 1977-78, and for Philadelphia Daily News, 1982-83. Contributor of poems to Minnesota Review, Black World, and other periodicals. Contributor of plays to Scripts, Black Theatre, Drama Review, and other theater journals. Contributor of articles to several journals, including Journal of African Civilizations.