Sonia Sanchez was born September 9, 1934 in Birmingham, Alabama. Her father, Wilson Driver, was a drummer in a jazz band. Her mother died in childbirth when Sonia was only a year old. After her mother's death, Sonia and her older sister went to live with their paternal grandmother. "Mama," as Sonia called her grandmother, died when Sonia was six and in the years that followed she drifted from family to stepmother to family friends. After high school she attended Hunter College, where she took creative writing courses. Sanchez spent three decades in Harlem before she settled in Philadelphia in 1976. She is currently a tenured Professor of English and Women's Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. She travels to give lectures, workshops, and poetry readings. She has traveled to read her poetry in Cuba, England, the West Indies, China, and many other countries. Sanchez is the winner of numerous awards for her work as an activist and a poet. Her book homegirls & handgrenades earned the 1985 American Book Award. She is also the author of children's fiction and plays. On the 1995 CD Sacred Ground, by Sweet Honey in the Rock, Sanchez reads her poem "I Have Come Into the City."

It was Sonia's relationship with her grandmother that unmasked her gift for poetry. Mama taught her to read at the age of four and little Sonia began to write at six and a half years. In her interview "Wear the New Day Well" for the A Movable Feast video documentary series, Sanchez recalls that poetry kept her alive during the difficult times following her grandmother's death. In her book of poetry,Under a Soprano Sky, Sanchez pays tribute to her grandmother in "Dear Mama." Sonia was an active and playful child with scrapes on her knees and dirt on her hands. But when the adults would verbalize their disapproval, Mama would say, "Let her be. She got a right to be different. She gonna stumble on herself one of these days. Just let the child be." Sanchez ends with a powerful, "And I be Mama."

During her years in New York City, Sanchez became active in the civil rights movement. She was a member of the New York activist group CORE. During this time she came into contact with Malcom X, also an activist working in Harlem. In A Moveable Feast Sanchez states that she learned a lot about language from Malcom X and applied it to her poetry. Malcom X was direct, truthful, and gave his black audience a sense of history and self worth. Sanchez's works are often passionate poems or works of prose that touch on social issues of modern and past times. Many of her poems are blunt, passionate, and painfully truthful. She addresses the history of African-Americans from slave times to modern oppression. From Malcom X she also learned how to present her poetry and always sustain the attention of the audience. This is a skill that Sanchez has mastered. (See A Moveable Feast for an example of the powerful delivery with which she presents her poems.)

 

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