Discipline and Craft: An Interview with Sonia Sanchez - Interview

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Susan Kelly

Best known as a poet and playwright, Sonia Sanchez has also written short stories, children's books, critical essays, and columns for various periodicals. Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver in Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1934, the daughter of Wilson L. Driver and Lena Jones Driver. Her bachelor of arts degree is from Hunter College, and she did graduate work at New York University. Wilberforce University awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1972. Divorced from Albert Sanchez, she has three children: Anita, Morani Neusi, and Mungu Neusi.

Sanchez's academic as well as literary career has been a long and distinguished one. She was a staff member at the Downtown School in New York from 1965 to 1967, an instructor at San Francisco State College from 1966 to 1968, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh from 1969 to 1970, an assistant professor at Rutgers University from 1970 to 1971, an assistant professor at Manhattan Community College from 1971 to 1973, and an associate professor at Amherst College and at the University of Pennsylvania. At present, she teaches at Temple University, where she is Laura H. Carnell Professor of English. She has also been a Distinguished Minority Fellow at the University of Delaware, Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Spelman College, and Zale Writer in Residence at Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University.

The list of honors Sanchez has collected is equally long and impressive: a PEN Writing Award in 1969; a National Institute of the Arts and Letters grant in 1970; a National Endowment for the Arts Award for 1978-1979; a Tribute to Black Women Award from the Black Students of Smith College in 1982; a Lucre tia Mott Award in 1984; an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1985; an International Women's Award from the Mayor's Commission for Women of Philadelphia in 1987; a Welcome Award from Boston's Museum of Afro-American History in 1990; an Oni Award from the International Black Women's Congress in 1992; a Women Pioneers Hall of Fame Citation from the Young Women's Christian Association, also in 1992; a Roots Award from the Pan-African Studies Community Education Program in 1993; a PEN fellowship in the arts for 1993-1994; and a Legacy Award from Jomandi Productions in 1995. She is an Honorary Citizen of Atlanta, Georgia.

Among Sanchez's books of poetry are Homecoming (1969), We a BaddDDD People (1970), Love Poems (1973), A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1973), I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1978), Homegirls & Handgrenades (1984), Under a Soprano Sky (1987), Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995), and Does Your House Have Lions (1995). For Folkways Records she did an album in 1971, A Sun Lady for All Seasons Reads Her Poetry.

Her children's books include It's a New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs (1971); The Adventures of Fat Head, Small Head, and Square Head (1973); and A Sound Investment and Other Stories (1979). She has edited Three Hundred and Sixty Degrees of Blackness Comin' at You (1971) and We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans (1973). Her plays are The Bronx is Next (1970); Sister Son/ji (1972); Dirty Hearts (1973); Uh Huh: But How Do It Free Us? (1975); Malcolm Man/Don't Live Here No More (1979); I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't (1982); and Black Cats Back and Uneasy Landings (1995). She has contributed to numerous anthologies.

Sanchez and I spoke on an evening when she was, by her own admission, exhausted, worried, and sad: She had recently returned from a trip to New York to care for her ailing father, and was preparing to visit writer Margaret Walker, whom she had just learned was dying of the cancer that had invaded her brain and robbed her of speech.

Kelly: What moved you to begin writing?

Sanchez: I began writing when I was a little girl, after my grandmother died and I began stuttering and being tongue-tied. The loss of Mama, my grandmother, made me begin that whole process of writing things down.

Kelly: There was a lot of upheaval in your early life, wasn't there? And you were transplanted from Alabama to New York.

Sanchez: Well, I don't know if there was a lot of upheaval. My mother died when I was one, giving birth. My grandmother died when I was six years old. My sister and I lived with a number of people--my aunt, and a dear friend of my father's--until he could get a place for us to be together. On that level, probably the most traumatic thing that happened to me was the death of my grandmother. Transplanting does not necessarily mean upheaval; it just means another place. The "real" problem was the death of the woman who loved me very much.

Kelly: What were the main literary and cultural influences on your poetry?

Sanchez: The cultural thing, I think, was the existence of us as black folk in a place that did not speak well of us, a country that not only had enslaved us but afterward had ignored us--had segregated us and conspired to keep us from learning even the simplest things.