SONIA SANCHEZ was born in 1934 in Birmingham, Alabama. She earned her BA in political science from Hunter College in 1955, did postgraduate work at New York University, and studied poetry under the mentorship of poet Louise Bogan. Sanchez is the author of more than 20 books, including Homecoming (1969), We a BaddDDD People (1970), Love Poems (1973), I’ve Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1978), A Sound Investment (1980), Homegirls and Handgrenades (1984), Under a Soprano Sky (1987), Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995), Does Your House Have Lions? (1997), Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (1998), Shake Loose My Skin (1999), Morning Haiku (2010), and, most recently, Collected Poems (2021). Awards and honors include the 2004 Harper Lee Award, an Alabama Distinguished Writer, the 2005 Leeway Foundation Transformational Award, the National Visionary Leadership Award for 2006, the 2009 Robert Creeley Award, the 2016 Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Wallace Stevens Award in 2018 presented by the Academy of American Poets, the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019, the 2021 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, the 2022 Edward MacDowell Medal, the 2022 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award (also administered by Poets & Writers), and the 2022 Jackson Poetry Prize, an $80,000 prize awarded annually by Poets & Writers.
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Bio as of 1/2023