This piece is a part of the Wildest Dreams project.

Sonia Sanchez is cold. The chill is deep in her bones. She wants to quit. Go back inside. Have a cup of tea. Curl up inside of herself.

But Sanchez is a teacher, not a quitter. And revolutionaries don’t play that. So she keeps her word and graciously hosts a group of journalists on her airy, Germantown porch who are eager to chat with Sister Sonia, Mama Sanchez, poet, agitator, and artist about her work, her legacy, her most recent book, Collected Poems, and her wildest dreams.

But don’t call her dreams wild. They are daydreams.

“A wild dream could be anything,” Sanchez said. “It could be you want lots of money. ... But to daydream, that means you are seeing the possibilities. [When I would daydream,] I would always see myself on stage and people were clapping. Whenever I dreamed, it was always that. I never did understand it as a young girl.”

Known for her spoken-word performances, Sanchez added the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize to her collection of awards in October. The Gish Prize will live alongside the former Philadelphia poet laureate’s impressive American Book and Harper Lee Awards. The prize, named after the early 20th-century Gish sisters and film actresses, is given annually to an individual who has made an “outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.”

Sanchez, prize organizers said, was chosen “in recognition of her ongoing achievements in inspiring change through the power of the word.” Past recipients include filmmaker Ava DuVernay, Spike Lee, composer and artist Meredith Monk, and the late novelist — and Sanchez’s friend and contemporary — Chinua Achebe. The prize comes with a $250,000 purse.

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The retired Temple professor is humbled by the honor. The Gish Prize is named after women, she said. That it is given by the arts community, is even more significant, she said. What will she do with the money? Help her family, of course. And this year, Sanchez says, “I’m giving a great deal of money back to my porch. I’m a porch sitter and I haven’t been comfortable sitting on my porch at this particular time.” Sanchez closes her eyes between thoughts. I wonder if she sees the words as verses in her mind’s eye as they tumble out of her consciousness and are absorbed by the chilly, autumn air.

“When I stand out here on my porch in the spring, summer, and fall and my roses are amazingly beautiful out front and the children come hopping and skipping by and they stop in front and I’m reading — sometimes nodding — but drinking tea and always writing, they stop and pull a rose off. And their parents, their mothers say, ‘Oh, don’t you bother Mrs. Sanchez’s roses,’ And I say, ‘That’s why they are there. And most especially for the children, so they can take it with them.’ ”

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At 87, Mama Sanchez is an elder, and not only will she share her roses with us, but she also believes it’s her duty to share her knowledge with us. Sanchez, one of the founders of the 1960s Black Arts Movement, was a teacher of critical race theory decades before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term.

When Sanchez’s generation was dissing hip-hop, she performed “Poem for Some Women” on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam’s inaugural season back in 2002. And last year Sanchez lent her voice to the HBO series Lovecraft Country with her reading of her 1995 poem, “Catch the Fire.” The Emmy-nominated Lovecraft focused on the lives of 1950s-era descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. It deals with the horrors of racism — literally and figuratively.

“The point of information is that finally you move with that information,” Sanchez said. “And every now and then you might turn around and smile at the past, but you got a future going there. That’s what this is truly all about. She pauses before assuming the attitude and intonation of her 1970 book We a BaaddDDD People. “[It’s] not for someone to say, ‘Oh Wow, ain’t we baddDDD. We are all baddDDD. We should be bad if you understand the terminology. What’s really bad is when you take that information and float it and it goes out into the universe, OK? And it floats into other people’s ears and they can take it and move with it.”

We talk for a little over an hour. She stops the interview midway through, goes back in the house and changes from her patent leather raincoat into an ankle-length, puffy coat. The temperature is in the 60s, but her chest is cold. (It’s always been the weakest part of her constitution.) She pulls her snug, knitted hat down over chin-length gray and white locks. She answers my questions with answers that meander. But she always returns to the central theme of the 20-plus books she’s written over six decades: What does it mean to be human?

Sanchez once described herself as a woman with razor blades between her teeth. The blades are still there, yet today they’re wrapped in a soft, stern blanket of love and affection. Collected Poems is living proof of her loving legacy. Join us as we give Sister Sonia her flowers now.

These answers have been edited for clarity.

On Family

The poem: “Dear Mama”

Real talk: “I love that poem. My mom died when I was about one and a half, giving birth to twins. ... After my mother died, we lived with my grandmother for some years until she died. I was about 5 or 6 years old. My father lived by himself. Mama took care of us. I saw my father, maybe during the holidays, when he would bring the most expensive little toys and little stoves with lights on that would pretend like they cooked food. Mama was a source of great strength.”

Living legacy: “I remember the mama who took good care of me and protected me. I would go outside and run and play with the boys because they played better games than the girls [who] stood up and didn’t do anything but look pretty outside. [The boys] would jump and stuff, and climb trees outside. I would kind of run with them and I would come in, as a consequence, all ragged, and my aunties in the house, who lived with mama and myself and Pat, my sister, would say, ‘Tsk, tsk. Look at Sonia,’ But look at Patricia, and I would say, ‘Yeah, she doesn’t do anything, all they do is stand and look pretty.’ But my mama was my protector and she would say, ‘Just let the girl be.’ I remember her saying that. ‘She be all right. She is going to stumble on gentleness one of these days.’ I don’t know if I have stumbled on gentleness. But I do know the following: What I do know is that the person who saved my life was my grandmother.”

On being a Black woman:

The poem: “womanhood”

Real Talk: “I am reminded of [W.E.B.] Du Bois. He could forgive America for the many things [it did to] us, the enslavement of us. [But] what he could never forgive: what America did to the Black woman. That is why I loved Du Bois. He knew at some point what was done to the Black woman changed a whole society of people. These women took care of children. When you look at HERstory and HIStory [and] if you are a Black woman you understand truly what he meant. Black men were enslaved. But Black women were enslaved and raped.”

Living legacy: “I told my father I was going to California. He said, ‘You almost got stomped in New York [for protesting]. Why don’t you just stay home and have babies?’ [But when you don’t like what’s happening,] you have to go into the schools as adult women, as mothers, as aunties; you have to go in and effect change. We [Black women ] fought for our freedom. This is how I brought in Black studies [to San Francisco State University].”

On community

The poem: “Elegy: for MOVE and Philadelphia”

Real talk: “After all those years, [there was no plaque in Philadelphia to say] on this date, this happened. This whole block burned. [But] these children in this [Jubilee] School, this private school. These Black and brown and white and Puerto Rican kids started to work with their teacher and they went to City Council and said, ‘We need a plaque.’ A plaque. Have you seen it? It’s on the block where MOVE happened. Isn’t it amazing? Children did that. Children from first to sixth grade. When I was told that... This [MOVE] was only the second time an American city was bombed. The first was Tulsa, Okla. And these children... That was amazing to me, just amazing.”

Living legacy: I’ve done Zoom with them [the children]. I talk to them. When I receive this award in New York, I’m going to thank all of the writers. [But] I’m going to dedicate it to those children. Those children who have read your poetry and you know, and write you notes about your poetry and would say ... write you a note that says you are my best friend. ... You continue to teach them. ... They will dare to say things. And at some point, they will pick up the hat and continue.”

On keeping it real

The poem: “Poem for Some Women”

Real talk: “I write about the drugs. I write about what happens. People say I shouldn’t write about it. There is this poem I did for Def Poetry Jam. It was about a woman who went to a drug house with her child to get drugs and the guy said, ‘I don’t want you, I want her.’ What happens then? You see the deterioration of the family once you see the deterioration of that mother there. She was hooked. She would leave her child in that house and come back seven days later to pick up her child.”

Living legacy: “I read the poem for the first time in a place called Philadelphia, and very siddity middle-class Black women didn’t want to hear it at all, and they got up and left as I read that poem. And I remember standing there, and I remember the younger students clapping, and I had tears in my eyes because that is not how we solve a problem by getting up and leaving. But in that poem I damned the people who sold drugs in our neighborhoods. I damned the man who would look at a child and think they see a woman and attack her. I damned the mother who would let drugs take the place of her child and remember seven days later she had a child and someone said to me, ‘Evidently this is how Black women are.’ I said, ‘Shut up. You are stupid.’ Excuse me ... [We have to] examine what happens. Why do we have drugs in our neighborhood. And I said prophetically: ‘You are going to have those same drugs in your neighborhood eventually.’ ”

On Black men’s lives matter

The poem: “A Poem of Praise: For Gerald Penny who died September 21, 1973, Amherst College and for the brothers of Amherst College. He drowned in the school pool.”

Real talk: I met Gerald Penny, my dear sister, when school was going to begin in August. He came up to me. I’ll never forget it. ‘My name is Gerald Penny,’ he said. ‘I’m 17 years of age...,’ I was at home cooking dinner for the children with my babysitter and there was a knock on the door and I open the door and there are three young men, Amherst men. [They said] Professor Sanchez, Gerald Penny is dead. He drowned in the pool. ... I remember getting a jacket, got my purse, took my keys, and we went out to the pool and there was Gerald Penny. They had him on this terrible cold floor. They just left him there. I said, ‘Pick him up,’.”

Living legacy: “You don’t see white kids walking the streets at night getting shot and killed and having a knee pressed on their neck or a young man saying, ‘I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.’ There is not equality in that kind of death, dying, and killing. This is what happens in our country. Someone asked me once: Are you surprised about this? This is not new. This is new to your generation, perhaps.”

On forward movement

The poem: “Poem”

Real talk: During the documentary they did with me, [BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez] people were [talking about reinventing themselves]. That’s the wrong word to use. When you reinvent yourself, the premise is that you don’t like yourself. Examine yourself. That’s what many of us had to do in the movement, and we had to reimagine ourselves on this American landscape. When you reinvent you stay in the same place. When you reimagine yourself you think, ‘How will I be 10 years from now?’ I know if I was the same person I was five years ago, I’d jump. You can’t look at the bloody mirror every day for 10 years and be satisfied seeing the same thing.”