Sanchez, Sonia

née Wilsonia Benita Driver

(born Sept. 9, 1934, Birmingham, Ala., U.S.) American poet, playwright, and educator who was noted for her black activism.

Sanchez lost her mother as an infant, and her father moved the family to Harlem, New York City, when she was nine. She received a B.A. (1955) in political science from Hunter College in Manhattan and briefly studied writing at New York University.

In the 1960s Sanchez was introduced to the political activism of the times and published poetry in such journals as The Liberator, Journal of Black Poetry, Black Dialogue, and Negro Digest. Her first book, Homecoming (1969), contains considerable invective against “white America” and “white violence”; thereafter she continued to write on what she called the “neoslavery” of blacks, as socially and psychologically unfree beings. She also wrote about sexism, child abuse, and generational and class conflicts. A good deal of Sanchez' verse is written in American black speech patterns, eschewing formal English grammar and pronunciations.

Over the years Sanchez joined other activists in promoting black studies in schools, in agitating for the rights of African countries, and in sponsoring various other causes, such as that of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. From 1966 she taught in various universities, finally assuming a permanent post as resident poet and member of the English faculty at Temple University, Philadelphia, in 1975. Later works include homegirls & handgrenades (1984), which won an American Book Award, Under a Soprano Sky (1986), and Does Your House Have Lions? (1997).