upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024
Featured Artist: Sonia Sanchez
Sonia Sanchez is a poet, activist, mother, and scholar. Her work speaks of issues ranging from peace to women's liberation to racial justice to 9/11. She writes poems that she hopes hold themselves “like a sliver to the heart of the world,” poems that do “battle for the creation of a human world, that is a world of reciprocal recognition.”
A lifetime activist for social change, Sonia participated in the Black Arts Movement and the Black Arts Repertoire Theater, helped found the first Black studies program in the U.S., and has taught many free courses at community venues and prisons. For her outstanding work, Sonia has received both the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry and the Langston Hughes Poetry Award.
A longtime resident of Germantown in northwest Philadelphia, Sonia has authored 16 books and received the Leeway Transformation Award in 2005 for her resilient body of work. Sonia describes her artistic practice as ongoing: for as she continues to speak for peace and against injustice, the many forms of silencing resistance in this country continue as well.
Video produced by Tina Morton (LTA '06, ACG '05)