Sonia Sanchez Biography

American poet, born in Birmingham, Alabama, educated at Hunter College, New York. From 1967 onwards she held posts at numerous colleges and universities and became Professor of English at Temple University, Philadelphia, in 1979. Homecoming (1969), WE a BaddDDD People (1970), and Liberation Poem (1970), her early collections of verse, established Sanchez as an outspoken and verbally inventive poet of African-American experience. Her work is noted for its uncompromising use of the speech forms of urban black communities, which extends across a wide stylistic and thematic range. Her membership of the Nation of Islam in the early 1970s is reflected in A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1974), which indicates her dissatisfaction with Islamic attitudes to women. I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1978), Under a Soprano Sky (1987), and Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995) are among her later collections of poetry. Her plays include Uh, Uh: But Do It Free Us?, produced in 1975, which deals with misogyny within black culture. A Sound Investment (1979) contains her short stories.