Doctor of Letters
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June 11, 2022
Internationally renowned poet, dramatist, educator and activist Sonia Sanchez has been an innovative and influential literary and poetic force for over five decades. She was one of the leading figures of the Black Arts Movement, and her musically inflected poetry and distinctive spoken-word stylistic experimentalism have inspired generations of writers and scholars.
Sanchez is the author of more than 20 acclaimed volumes of poetry, including We a BaddDDD People, Homegirls and Handgrenades (winner of a 1985 American Book Award), Under a Soprano Sky, Does Your House Have Lions?, Like the Singing Coming off the Drums, Shake Loose My Skin, Morning Haiku and—most recently—Collected Poems. She is also the author of numerous plays and books for children.
Sanchez was a pioneer in developing Black studies courses at what is now San Francisco State University, where she was an instructor in 1968–69. She was the first Black woman on the faculty at Amherst College, where she taught from 1972 to 1975, during which time she was the second person to chair the Black studies department.
The recipient of countless awards and recognitions, including most recently the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, the Edward MacDowell Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets, and the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achieve- ment Award, Sanchez was Philadelphia’s first poet laureate, acclaimed as “the longtime conscience of the city.” In 2017, BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez, a documentary about Sanchez’s life as an artist and activist, was nominated for an Emmy Award.
Sanchez held the Laura Carnell Chair in English at Temple University from 1977 until her retirement in 1999 and was Temple’s first Presidential Fellow. She holds a B.A. from Hunter College and pursued graduate studies at New York University, where she studied poetry with Louise Bogan.