Sanchez married Albert Sanchez, an immigrant from Puerto Rico, with whom she had a daughter. “Our enslavement had taken us off the world stage.” “What I attempted to do, and I think all the other black arts poets attempted to do, is that we were about putting the African American and African back on the world stage,” Sanchez told The Washington Post in 2012. In Greenwich Village, she started a writer’s workshop and launched the Broadside Quartet with Nikki Giovanni, Haki R. Sanchez graduated with a bachelor of arts from Hunter College in 1955, then continued her studies with the poet Louise Bogan at New York University. She often describes her revelatory discovery, at age 19, of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library. She eventually overcame her speaking impediment and excelled in school. Her father took her and her sister north to Harlem in 1943.įor a time, the stutter made Sonia into an introvert and tuned her ear even more acutely to language. When she also died, a bereft Sonia developed a stutter. At age one, her mother, Lena Jones Driver, died in childbirth, and Sonia came into the care of her paternal grandmother. describes her work in both the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movement as molding generations.īorn in Birmingham, Alabama, Sonia was christened Wilsonia Benita Driver, after her father, Wilson Driver. Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Jury Chair Henry Louis Gates Jr. “I write to keep contact with our ancestors and spread the truth to people,” Sanchez says. Sanchez is celebrated for elevating the performative aspect of language, its musicality and repetition, and for her storyteller’s electric rapport with audiences. She has spent most of her 84 years calling all types of people toward freedom and dignity with her pen and her voice. Sonia Sanchez-poet, playwright, activist and educator-is an architect of the Black Arts Movement, a mid-20th century renewal of black will, energy and artist awareness.
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