Sonia Sanchez

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.