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Books by Sonia Sanchez
Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems
(1999) /
Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums:
Love Poems (1998)
Does Your House Have Lions?
(1995) /
Wounded in the House of a
Friend (1995) /
Under a Soprano Sky
(1987) /
Homegirls
& Handgrenades (1984)
I've Been
a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1978)
/
A Blues Book for
Black Magical Women (1973) /
We
a BaddDDD People (1970)
Homecoming
(1969) /
A Sound Investment and Other
Stories (1979) /
The Adventure of Fat Head, Small
Head,
and Square Head (1973)
It's a New Day: Poems for
Young Brothas and Sistuhs (1971) /
We Be Word Sorcerers:
Twenty-five Stories by Black Americans (1973)
Living
At The Epicenter (Morse Poetry Prize) (1995)
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Sonia Sanchez: Poet & Educator
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.
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Poet,
Activist,
Sonia
Sanchez
Reading
Toni
Cade
Bambara
Sonia Sanchez: Shake Loose Memories /
Sonia Sanchez speaks about Shake Loose Memories
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Sonia Sanchez on the State of Black Books—
I'm usually reading five or six different books
at a time. I'm reading Dreams
in a Time of War by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. I
remember when Ngugi was writing this book because I
was writing the first part of my memoir at the same
time. The joy of this memoir is simply that he talks
about his views as a boy during World War II. So we
get a wonderful sense of who he is as a young man.
I'm reading the
biography—the only biography—of John Oliver Killens
[John
Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism by
Keith Gilyard], a great novelist who died too early,
too young. I make sure all of my students read him.
I'm also reading Isabel Allende's new book, The
Island Beneath the Sea (La isla bajo el
mar). I just love Isabel and what she writes and the
musicality of her work. I just got in the mail
yesterday
Nairobi Heat, a detective novel by Mukoma wa
Ngugi, Ngugi's son, that I can't wait to start
reading.
And I'm reading
the manuscript for this new anthology on rap, so I'm
immersing myself in Chuck D, Rakim and Talib Kweli.
I'm so happy this book is happening and that they
asked me to write a blurb for it because they said I
was one of the older people who support young
rappers. And I do. I get up in the morning now and I
play Rakim's "Casualties of War" to remind myself
about the dead bodies that come home every day
because of the two wars we are involved in.—TheRoot
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 22 December 2008
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