Sonia Sanchez talks about writing, the presidential election, and being a ‘BaddDDD’ sister at 90

Delicious memories of titans in Black history and the arts are folded into the intimate stories of Sonia Sanchez’s remarkable life.

Sanchez and poet Amiri Baraka developed the country’s first Black studies program in the 1960s at San Francisco State University. Sanchez and June Jordan introduced conversational Black English to contemporary poetry, the precursor to spoken word performances. She worked with Nikki Giovanni to form the Broadside Quartet, a group of young Black poets in Greenwich Village. Jazz drummer and composer Max Roach gave Sanchez the piano on which he composed his revolutionary album demanding civil rights, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.

The world-renowned poet, activist, and agitator taught English at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1970s alongside the father of African literature and author of Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, before spending 23 years teaching at Temple University. In 2012, Mayor Michael Nutter named Sanchez Philadelphia’s first poet laureate and literary seers Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Rita Dove called to congratulate her.

Let that sink in for a moment: Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Rita Dove called her. (Morrison and Dove came to Philadelphia in 2014 for a party celebrating the end of Sanchez’s two-year tenure as poet laureate.)

We are sitting on Sanchez’s Germantown porch discussing her amazing life in honor of her 90th birthday on Sept. 9. I’m awed. Sanchez and her literary cohorts shaped my writing career. I owe them so much: Def Poetry Jam, Love Jones, The Roots.

Do you still write every day? I ask her. Of course. In fact, she’s working on a memoir. It occurs to me, how can Sanchez not have a memoir in a world where 25 year-olds go on and on about themselves for hundreds of pages?

“My dear sister,” Sanchez began. Her graying locks — cut into a cute chin-length bob — are stuffed under a straw bucket hat. She’s wrapped in a fleece jacket and taps a majestic wooden cane fit for the ancestors to make her points. “We were never taught to praise ourselves, but to praise the work,” she said. “People always used to tell me to get up and say this and say that about yourself. That’s not for me to say. That’s for other people to say.”

September belongs to Sanchez. Philadelphia arts organizations — the Barnes, Mural Arts Philadelphia, and Temple University — are celebrating her all month with spoken word, the rededication of her mural on South Philly’s Christian Street, and an in-person conversation with Sanchez at Temple University’s Charles Library.

The Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture, where Sanchez was introduced to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston, will host a private party in her honor. Authors Walter Mosely and Alice Walker are on the guest list. She’s that BaddDDD.

“It feels good to still be walking on this earth,” Sanchez said a few days before her milestone birthday. “I’m still lucid. I still walk every day. I still write. I still come down the steps and I dance. Yes, I dance. I walk around with my trainer. I do yoga. I do all the things that keep me going.”

She pauses.

“You see this country puts a lot of emphasis on age, but you know you are only as old as you think you are. You have to listen to your body. Listen to what it says. It will tell you what you need to do.”

The wind chimes tinkle in agreement.

Sonia Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver in Birmingham, Ala. Her mother died in childbirth when Sanchez was just 1. Her father, Wilson L. Driver, was a teacher, musician, and nightclub owner. He was tight with A.G. Gaston, the funeral home director who financed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s early civil rights work. Driver and Gaston played cards together and Sanchez watched.

“I learned a lot about people watching them play poker,” she said. “Within 30 minutes you can learn how people win, lose, and what they look like when they are bluffing.”

Sanchez, her dad, and her sister, Pat, moved to St. Nicholas Place in Harlem during the 1940s where she attended elementary and high school. Sanchez was so bright, she skipped several grades and enrolled in Hunter College when she was 16. She earned her master’s degree at NYU when she was 19 and attended Malcolm X’s lectures, inspired by his words.

By her early 20s she’d be an English professor, pioneering courses in Black studies in California before teaching the first college-level course dedicated to the study of Black women at the University of Pittsburgh. This wasn’t a time when Black history was embraced. In fact it was discouraged. “We had a hard time,” she said.

Sanchez moved to Philadelphia in 1976. She witnessed the rise and fall of MOVE — she would be a fierce advocate of the revolutionary organization’s right to exist. She was in Philly for the inauguration of Philadelphia’s first Black mayor, its first female mayor, and the gentrification of Philadelphia’s Black neighborhoods. This awareness fuels her work.

And through it all she taught and wrote into the wee hours of the night and morning. She’s written more than 20 books of poetry, children’s stories, college texts, and essays. The most recent, Collected Poems, published in 2021 by Beacon Press, is dedicated to her twin sons Mungu and Morani.

» READ MORE: Walking Upright In America

“I was up writing at 2 or 3 in the morning and I put my head down because I was tired,” the mother of three said remembering. “I thought to myself, ‘Why don’t I have someone to help me live, so I can write? And then I went to the classroom and it hit me, I was supposed to teach and write at the same time. They support each other. They support me.”

Sanchez still does her best writing in the hours before the sun rises. “It’s a habit I could never break,” she said. “I was always up teaching and grading papers. It’s the only time I have to myself.”

That’s the time she’s supposed to be working on her memoir. However, she keeps getting distracted. “Something keeps happening in the universe that I have to respond to,” she said.

Sometimes it’s the death of close friends. Giovanni is still alive. But most of her friends in the struggle — Jordan, Baraka, Angelou, and Morrison — are gone. She finds herself having late night/early morning chats with younger writers like Jeannine Cook from Harriett’s Bookshop. A younger voice, yes, but the same revolutionary spirit. She thinks about the books that have been banned, remembering a time when her books were on the list. She stresses, “Books cannot be banned unless we allow them,” vowing, to keep working to resurrect the fight against that.

She worries about bombs and guns in the hands of the wrong people and the war against racial and gender equality. True freedom comes when people of all races and genders are free. And of course there is the presidential election. Like her, Vice President Kamala Harris is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority. Sanchez is excited at the possibility of a Black woman becoming president of the United States. About Harris: “She’s a prosecutor, the only one that can take on 45,” she says about the tight race between Harris and former President Donald Trump.

Still, Sanchez is content. She’s learned the lessons. She’s taught the lessons. Her life is the lesson.

After talking for nearly two hours, I feel like my questions have barely grazed the surface of her life. But she’s tired now. She has parties to prepare for. It’s important she rest so she can write. The world needs her memoir.