Sonia Sanchez is Professor Emerita at Temple University, from which she retired in 2000. In 2011 she became the first Poet Laureate of Phildelphia. She is world renowned poet and an international lecturer on Black Culture and Literature, Women’s Liberation, Peace and Racial Justice. She is a sponsor of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and board member of MADRE. Dr. Sanchez is the author of over sixteen books including Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, Love Poems, I’ve Been a Woman, Wounded in the House of a Friend (Beacon Press, 1995),Does Your House Have Lions? (Beacon Press, 1997), Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (Beacon Press, 1998), Shake Loose My Skin (Beacon Press, 1999), and most recently, Morning Haiku (Beacon Press, 2010).
In addition to being a contributing editor to The Black Scholar and the Journal of African Studies, she has edited an anthology, We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans. BMA: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review is the first African American journal that discusses the work of Sonia Sanchez and the Black Arts Movement. Does Your House Have Lions? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She 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. Her poetry also appeared in the movie Love Jones.
Dr. Sanchez has lectured at over 500 universities and colleges in the US 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 was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University and she held the Laura Carnell Chair in English at Temple University. She is the recipient of the Harper Lee Award, 2004, Alabama Distinguished Writer, and the National Visionary Leadership Award for 2006. She is the recipient of the 2005 Leeway Foundation Transformational Award. She was the recipient of the Robert Creeley award in March of 2009.
