When one reads Sonia Sanchez, one knows the state of black America.
—Linda Duggins, Host of Talking Books from QBR (New York based radio program)

Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934) is a prolific writer, serious, and original. Her poems depict the struggles between black people and white people, between men and women, and between cultures. She is innovative in her use of language and structure, sometimes using Black

speech in her poetry. She too has a brilliant sense of history, and a vision of her people being truly free. "right on: white america" is one of her best poems. America, she writes, was once 'a pio/neer land', but it had systematically eliminated through intolerance all those that it saw different. Thus, "there ain't ./no mo/ indians', 'no mo real/white allamerican/bad/guys. The only ones left now are the black people and they had better 'check out', for the guns and shells are falling to decimate them and a bleak future awaits them unless they do something about it.

Sanchez is a recent recipient (2001) of the Robert Frost medal in poetry.  One of the highest honors awarded to a nationally recognized poet. One of the most important writers of the Black Arts Movement; Sanchez is the author of sixteen books and lives in Philadelphia.

Sanchez in tribute to Toni Cade Bambara reads from Toni's work during the 2010 National Black Writers' Conference 

 

I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't and Other Plays
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book cover photo Lynda Koolish

Paperback: 208 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press (2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822347784
ISBN-13: 978-0822347781

"Sonia Sanchez remains one of the most read, respected, and visible figures of the Black Arts Movement, as well as its most significant female figure. This volume only adds to that legacy." --Amiri Baraka

This collection brings together for the first time the plays of Sonia Sanchez, a prolific, award-winning poet and one of the most prominent writers in the Black Arts Movement. In addition to Sanchez's five previously published plays The Bronx Is Next (1970), Dirty Hearts (1971), Sister Son/ji (1972), Malcolm/Man Don't Live Here No Mo (1979) Uh, Uh; But How Do It Free Us? (1975), and , the collection also includes her two unpublished plays, I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't (1982) and 2 x 2 (2009).

It reveals the thematic and formal exchanges between Sanchez's poetry and dramatic works over the course of four decades. Sanchez emerged as a black nationalist poet and playwright in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like her poetry, her dramas reflect her critique of the racism and sexism that she encountered as a young female writer in the black militant community, her ongoing concern with the well-being of the black community, and her commitment to social justice. I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't and Other Plays includes three essays in which Sanchez reflects on her art and activism, and an introduction by Jacqueline Wood situating Sanchez's plays in relation to her poetry, activism, and the feminist dramatic voice in black revolutionary art.

 

Homegirls and Handgrenades
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ISBN: 1893996808
Pub. Date: April 2007
Format: Paperback, 96pp
Publisher: White Pine Press NY

A reprint of Sonia Sanchez's award-winning collection, which contains some of her seminal work.Winner of the American Book Award

This book is another expression of the continuing creativity of Sonia Sanchez. Some pieces are plaintive and poignant, others are tough and militant, but all are significant, brilliant and original. Here again is another example of Black speech, a vernacular familiar to all who know and love this author's previous work.   - Margaret Walker

 

Full Moon of Sonia

Listen to samples from all tracks

"Full Moon of Sonia" is a celebration of the life and work of a cultural icon and national treasure of Sonia Sanchez, affectionately and deservedly known as the "Poet Laureate of the Planet". It fuses a wide range of musical styles with the poetry of Sonia Sanchez in a groundbreaking CD that underscores Ms. Sanchez' contribution to poetry and performance in the 20th century. Further, Ms. Sanchez' unique performance style serves as a reminder of her impact on the oral tradition in African-American literature.

Her influence is far-reaching and wide ranging and can be heard in such artists as Mos Def, Jill Scott, Talib, Rakin, to name a few. She has been a guest artist on albums with greats such as Diana Ross and has collaborated with such artists as Eric Benet. Her latest album, the first in 25 years, reflects a diverse offering of musical and poetic styles that spans R&B, Jazz, Afro-Cuban, Gospel, and Hip-Hop. This breakthrough CD marks a new plateau in a career that stretches over four decades. On this CD, Ms. Sanchez has assembled some of the finest composers, musicians, and vocalists working in music today.

"Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature's forest...This world is a better place because of Sonia Sanchez: more livable, more laughable, more manageable. I wish millions of people knew that some of the joy in their lives comes from the fact that Sonia Sanchez is writing poetry."
- Maya Angelou

Read an article about Sonia Sanchez celebrating the release of her new CD called The Full Moon of Sonia

 

Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems
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Publisher:  Beacon Press
Date Published:  December 1998
Format:  Trade Cloth

Coming on the heels of Sanchez's 1998 nominations for both the National Book Critics Circle and the NAACP Image Awards, Shake Loose My Skin covers over thirty years of work and is a testament to her literary, sensual, and political powers. Sanchez combines an ear for the rhythms of street speech with a sophisticated formal repertoire. She shifts with ease from a blues-inspired love poem to a political call to arms. She is a master of haiku, tanka, and even villanelle, but constantly reconstructs these and other forms with her unique poetic vision. Her world is one of hardship, violence, and oppression, but it is also one of passion, fortitude, and tenderness.

 

Like the Singing Coming off the Drums : Love Poems
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Publisher:  Beacon Press
Date Published:  January 1998
Format:  Trade Cloth

Synopsis A collection of sensual love poems from one of the most prominent African-American poets and a leader of the Black Arts Movement.

Here is a collection of new love poems from Sonia Sanchez. In haiku, tanka, and sensual blues, Sanchez writes of the many forms love takes: burning, dreamy, disappointed, and vulnerable. In three sections - Naked in the Streets, Shake Loose My Skin, and In This Wet Season - she takes us from the most intimate landscapes of passion to its public celebration in love poems dedicated to icons of our age, including Tupac Shakur and Ella Fitzgerald.. 

 

Does Your House Have Lions
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Publisher: Beacon Press
Format: Hardcover & Paperbackr
Publication Date: April 1997

Did You Know?
Does Your House Have Lions, is written in rhyme royal. This is a form that not many writers can tackle at all, much less tell a story --  by writing dozens of verses in the structure while altering the form to create characters with different speech patterns and tones.

Does Your House Have Lions? explores the life of Sonia Sanchez's brother - a vibrant young man who left the South for New York, immersed himself in the city's gay subculture, and became a victim of AIDS in the first years of the pandemic. Sanchez describes her brother's alienation from his family and his illness and death from AIDS with her characteristic tenderness. Told in the voices of sister, brother, father, mother, and ancestors, it is the story of kin estranged and then finally brought together by their shared history of loss, separation, and pain. This brave epic poem shatters silences surrounding gay sexuality in African-American families and imagines the possibility of reconciliation and love. It offers a meditation on the living meanings of journey, life, and death - an opportunity for all of us to find a way home.

 

Wounded in the House of a Friend
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ISBN: 0807068276
Format: Paperback, 128pp
Pub. Date: April 1997
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Here, in her first book in eight years, Sonia Sanchez offers a powerful exploration of personal and shared pain. With passion and precision, Wounded in the House of a Friend confronts issues of rape, race, and gender and grapples with the assault of emotions spawned by betrayals of the mind and spirit - a husband's infidelity, a rape, a granddaughter's drug addiction, the divisions invoked by racism. But this collection is much more than an anatomy of wounds; it is a praise song to the spirit of all people, a testament to the hope that is rebuilt after each private apocalypse. With her mastery of haiku, narrative poetry, and African-American lyricism, Sanchez releases the voices of unspoken pain, transforming the wounds into a healing path of self-fulfillment and liberation, opening the way to a recognition of a new self and renewed self-worth.

 

Homegirls and Handgrenades: Poems
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ISBN: 1560251433
Format: Paperback, 77pp
Pub. Date: September 1997
Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press
Edition Description: REPRINT
Edition Number: 2

In a style that is hers alone, Sonia Sanchez brings politics and poetry together as she passionately relates scenes from the lives of poor blacks. "Sanchez is a remarkable writer . . . this is s book in which the whole adds up to far more than the parts."

 

Home Coming 
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Paperback
Publisher: Broadside Pr (June 1, 1969)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0910296057
ISBN-13: 978-0910296052
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.2 x 0.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces

First book published by Sanchez!

"Sanchez became swept up in the revolutionary social movements of the 1960s. Her first two collections of poetry, Home Coming (1969) and We a BaddDDD People (1970), reflect her militant, antiwhite stance, inspired in part by the example of Malcolm X. She incorporates dialect and profanity into her pithy, biting poems, and the tone is usually combative. Sanchez unleashed some of her rage at America's Anglocentric educational system. Her criticisms, however, were followed by suggestions, and she has become a powerful advocate of black studies programs."
'Black American Women Fiction Writers (Writers of English: Lives and Works), Harold Bloom, ed., 1995.

 

Jazz Poetry Kafe (Poetry/Jazz/Spoken Word CD)

Executive Producer: Kwame Alexander (Contributors Include: Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, Fertile Ground, wadud, Tony Medina, and many more.)

Sister Sanchez is also included on the Jazz Poetry Kafe: The BlackWords Compilation CD http://aalbc.com/poet/jazz.htm

 

Sonia Sanchez: Shake Loose Memories - Trailer

 

Related Links

Sonia Sanchez and Ten Grandmothers Acquitted of "Defiant Trespassing" by Jamie Walker

Sonia Sanchez Performs 'Full Moon' Concert in NYC by Jamie Walker

Sacred Circle/Spoken Word Conference

 

RHYME ROYAL

A stanza of seven lines of heroic or five-foot iambic verse, rhyming ababbcc. It probably received its name from its use by James I of Scotland who was both king and a poet.

 

Sanchez photos by Troy Johnson, Founder AALBC.com