Sanchez, Sonia

September 19, 1934

The poet Sonia Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver, the daughter of Wilson L. and Lena Jones Driver, in Birmingham, Alabama. During her childhood in the South and in Harlem, she was outraged by the way American society systematically mistreated black people. This sense of racial injustice transformed her from a shy, stuttering girl into one of the most vocal writer-activists in contemporary literature. In the early 1960s she began publishing poems under her married name, Sonia Sanchez, which she continued to use professionally after she and her husband divorced. Although best known for her verse, which urges black unity and action and reflects the cadences of African-American speech and music, she is also an accomplished dramatist, essayist, and editor, as well as an enduring proponent of black studies.

Sanchez studied at Hunter College in New York (B.A., 1955) and at New York University and has taught at many institutions, including Rutgers, the University of Pittsburgh, and Amherst College. She worked during the civil rights movement as a supporter of the Congress of Racial Equality, but in 1972 she joined the Nation of Islam because she thought that it was doing more to instill cultural pride and morality in young people. In a 1983 interview, Sanchez said that her political and cultural affiliations, harassment by the FBI, and her insistence that black writers be included in curricula explained why she did not gain a permanent academic position until 1978, when she became a professor at Temple University. Sanchez later held the chair of the English department and directed the women's studies program at Temple.

In Homecoming (1969), her first collection of poetry, Sanchez addressed racial oppression using angry voices derived from street talk. She soon became sought after for her passionate, confrontational readings. Although her use of profanity was shocking to some, she has never regretted her artistic approach: "There is vulgar stuff out there. One has got to talk about it in order for it not to be."

While the plight of African Americans in a white society is her major subject, Sanchez has also critiqued struggles within the black community. Sister Son/ji, a play produced off-Broadway in 1972, is about a militant young woman fighting the sexism of the black revolutionary movement. Sanchez herself left the Nation of Islam in 1975 because the organization would not change the subservient role it assigned to women.

Books by Sanchez include poetry collections, such as We a BaddDDD People (1970), A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1973), homegirls & handgrenades (1984), Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums: Love Poems (1998), and Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (1999); juvenile fiction, including A Sound Investment and Other Stories (1979); plays, such as Uh, Huh: But How Do It Free Us? (1975), and Malcolm Man/Don't Live Here No More (1979); as well as numerous contributions to journals, recordings, and anthologies as a poet, essayist, and editor. Does Your House Have Lions? chronicles her brother's struggle with AIDS and was nominated for both the 1997 NAACP Image Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995) confronts topics such as rape and drug abuse in a mixture of poetry and prose.

Sanchez has received major awards from PEN (1969), the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1970), and the National Endowment for the Arts (1978–1979). Other honors include the Lucretia Mott Award (1984), the Smith College Tribute to Black Women Award (1982), doctorates from Wilberforce University (1972) and Temple University (1998), and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (1985).

See also Nation of Islam; Poetry, U.S.

Bibliography

Barksdale, Richard, and Keneth Kinnamon, eds. Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

Joyce, Joyce Ann. Ijala: Sonia Sanchez and the African Poetic Tradition. Chicago: Third World Press, 1996.

Kelly, Susan. "Discipline and Craft: An Interview with Sonia Sanchez." African American Review 34, no. 4 (winter 2000).

Salaam, Kalamu ya. "Sonia Sanchez." In Dictionary of Literary Biography: Afro-American Poets Since 1955, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1985.

Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983.

dekker dare (1996)
Updated by author 2005