Sonia Sanchez

Books by Sonia Sanchez

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Sonia Sanchez, on September 9, 1934, was born Wilsonia Benita Driver in Birmingham Alabama. Her mother died a year later, and Sanchez lived with her paternal grandmother and other relatives for several years. In 1943, she moved to Harlem with her sister to live with their father and his third wife. In 1955, she earned a B.A. in political science from Hunter College. She also did postgraduate work at new York University and studied poetry with Louise Bogan. Sanchez formed a writers' workshop in Greenwich Village, attended by such poets as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), and Larry Neal. Along with Madhubuti, Nikki Giovanni, and Etheridge Knight, she formed the "Broadside Quartet" of young poets, introduced and promoted by Dudley Randall.

She married and divorced Albert Sanchez, a Puerto Rican immigrant whose surname she has used when writing, and married in 1968 the poet Etheridge Knight, with whom she had three children. During the early 1960s she was an integrationist, supporting the philosophy of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). But after considering the ideas of Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, who believed blacks would never be truly accepted by whites in the United States, she focused more on her black heritage from a separatist point of view. Sanchez began teaching in the San Francisco area in 1965 and was a pioneer in developing black studies courses at what is now San Francisco State University, where she was an instructor from 1968-1969. In 1971, she joined the Nation of Islam, but by 1976 she had left the Nation, largely because of its repression of women.

Sonia Sanchez is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, including Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1999), Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums: Love Poems (1998); Does Your House Have Lions? (1995), which was nominated for both the NAACP Image and National Book Critics Circle Award; Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995); Under a Soprano Sky (1987). Homegirls & Handgrenades (1984), a collection of autobiographical prose poems, received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Titles of other works include I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1978); A Blues Book for Black Magical Women (1973); Liberation Poem (1970); We a BaddDDD People (1970); and Homecoming (1969).

Her published plays are Black Cats Back and Uneasy Landings (1995), I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't (1982); Malcolm Man/Don't Live Here No Mo' (1979); Uh Huh: But How Do It Free Us? (1974); Dirty Hearts 72 (1973); The Bronx Is Next (1970); and Sister Sonji (1969). Her books for children include A Sound Investment and Other Stories (1979), The Adventure of Fat Head, Small Head, and Square Head (1973), and It's a New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs (1971).

She also edited two anthologies: We Be Word Sorcerers: Twenty-five Stories by Black Americans (1973) and Three Hundred Sixty Degrees of Blackness Comin' at You (1971).Living At The Epicenter (Morse Poetry Prize) (1995)

Sonia Sanchez has lectured at more than five hundred universities and colleges in the United States and traveled extensively, reading her poetry, in Africa, Cuba, England, the Caribbean, Australia, Nicaragua, the People's Republic of China, Norway, and Canada. She was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University, where she began teaching in 1977, and held the Laura Carnell Chair in Englisd there until her retirement in 1999. She lives in Philadelphia.