Poet and activist Sonia Sanchez is recognized as being one of the trailblazers of the Black Arts Movement. She is credited with being a heavyweight along with her contemporaries such as Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka. Dolores Bundy, a freelance writer with Suite101.com, describes Sanchez as "the single most influential force in African-American literary and political culture for more than three decades." Accompanying her over a dozen published books of poetry, she has also published literature for children and has had a hand in playwrighting. Sanchez also had a 30-year span of an extroadinary teaching career and has traveled extensively, reading her work at over 500 universities and colleges around the United States and abroad. While she was a highlighted intellectual of the Black Arts Movement, she launched a Black studies program at the institution which is now known as San Francisco State University. Sanchez's political activities later resulted in her losing employment and placed her on hiatus from teaching because she was not able to get a job, and that all shifted direction when she landed a position at Temple University. Her writing has covered the subjects of feminism, sexism, racism, and other divisions of human identities.
Following in the tradition of Langston Hughes, she blew the dust off jazz and blues poetry and incorporated it into her work. The elements of these genres can be found in many of her poems, especially in her readings of them. This is seen in her Def Poetry performance of "Poem for Some Women", a piece about drug addiction in sort of a blues style. Sanchez is able to bring out the characteristics of who and what she describes with her dramatic tones. When she published her first book of poetry, Homecoming, in 1969, she explored Black dialect as a poetic medium, which could be called as a revamping of the styles of past writers like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Zora Neale Hurston. Professor T. Edwards at the University of Florida has had this to say about Sanchez: "She has integrated current events, social commentaries, rap music, and history. She uses her own life experiences and poetry into describing the process of writing and becoming a poet. And she gave voice and life to the written words of her books." She has become an artist of magnitude who has stayed relevant to the world of literature today, even inspiring younger generations of spoken word artists. There is no doubt that Sonia Sanchez remains a literary icon of importance and will be studied and recognized for years to come.
