Who is sonia sanchez

She is a Black poet , writer, and professor. Driver and Lena Jones Driver. Her mother died when Sanchez was only one year old, so she spent several years being shuttled back and forth among relatives.

One of those was her grandmother, who died when Sanchez was six. The death of her grandmother proved to be a trying time in her life. Though only six, Sanchez suffered from losing her loved one, developing a stutter that contributed to her becoming introverted. However, her stutter only caused her to read more and more and pay close attention to language and its sounds.

In , she moved to Harlem to live with her father the schoolteacher , her sister, and her stepmother, who was her father's third wife. When in Harlem, she learned to manage her stutter and excelled in school, finding her poetic voice which later emerged during her studies at Hunter College.

Sanchez focused on the sound of her poetry, admitting to always reading her poetry aloud, and received praise for her use of the full range of African and African American vocal resources.

She is known for her sonic range and dynamic public readings. She now terms herself as an "ordained stutterer. These young poets were introduced and promoted by Dudley Randall, an established poet and publisher. Although her first marriage to Albert Sanchez did not last, Sonia Sanchez would retain her professional name.

She and Albert had one daughter named Anita. Already a member? Contribute to our 20 Campaign. Education MegaMenu. Higher Education. Classroom Support. Sonia Sanchez. She became a leading voice in this group. Although her first marriage date unknown to Puerto Rican immigrant Albert Sanchez did not last, Sonia Sanchez would remain her professional name.

In , Sanchez married poet-activist Etheridge Knight and they had three children: Anita, Morani, and Mungu, but later divorced. During the s and s, she was affiliated with the black arts movement and the civil rights movement in New York City, and she believed at first in integration.

Later, when she heard Malcolm X say that blacks would never become part of America's mainstream, she based her identity on her racial heritage. Her poetry focused on the black struggle for liberation from racial and economic oppression and used the language of the streets instead of the language of academe. She became one of the first poets to blend ghetto impressions with lower-case letters, slashes, dashes, hyphenated lines, unconventional spelling, abbreviations, and further untried uses of language and structure to reinterpret what a poem is, does, and for whom it is written.

She also has written poems in ballad form, letters, and haikus. Sanchez's initial volume of poems, Homecoming, published in , addressed racial oppression in angry voices taken from street conversations. Haki Madhubuti noted in Black Women Writers, A Critical Evaluation that she respected the power of urban street talk and was responsible more than any other poet for "legitimizing the use of urban Black English in written form. William Pitt Root wrote about her early poems in Poetry , "Her poems are raps, good ones, aimed like guns at whatever obstacles she detects standing in the way of Black progress Her praises are as generous as her criticisms are severe, both coming from loyalties that are fierce, invulnerable, and knowing.

Whether she's addressing her praises to Gwendolyn Brooks or to the late Malcolm X, to her husband or to a stranger's child, always they emerge from and feed back into the shared experience of being Black. By the early s Sanchez had left the "Broadside Quartet" to write and give poetry readings on her own. How her poems sound when read out loud has always been of importance to Sanchez. She has been sought out for her impassioned, bold readings which often create a spontaneous feeling, like that of a jazz solo.

Since the s she has published a steady stream of poetry books, mainly for adults but also one for children, as well as plays which she had been writing since the s. Sanchez began writing plays while in San Francisco in the s. Sanchez recalled in African American Review that "Dr. Arthur P. Davis, that grand old man of letters down at Howard University, called it one of the great plays of the s.

I forever am grateful to him for putting that play into perspective for me. Career: Downtown School, New York, instructor, ; San Francisco State College, instructor, ; University of Pittsburgh, assistant professor, ; Rutgers University, assistant professor, ; Manhattan Community College, assistant professor of black literature and creative writing teacher of writing, ; Amherst College, associate professor,; Muhammad Speaks, columnist, s? Carnell Professor of English, She earned a BA in political science from Hunter College in Madhubuti Don L.

Lee , and Larry Neal. She married and divorced Albert Sanchez, a Puerto Rican immigrant whose surname she kept. She was also married for two years to Knight. 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 and was a pioneer in developing black studies courses at what is now San Francisco State University, where she was an instructor from to In , she joined the Nation of Islam, but by she had left the Nation, largely because of its repression of women. In , she received the Wallace Stevens Award , given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.

Sanchez has lectured at more than five hundred universities and colleges in the United States and had 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 , and held the Laura Carnell Chair in English there until her retirement in