Conversations with Sonia Sanchez

by Joyce A. Joyce

Overview

Conversations with Sonia Sanchez is a diverse collection of engagements with poet, teacher, and activist Sonia Sanchez. While it is common to associate Sanchez with the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, these interviews reveal that Sanchez is a poet whose craft and subjects have evolved over three decades. The interviews from 1979 to 2005 include a previously unpublished interview conducted by the editor specifically for this book. Taken together, the pieces illuminate Sanchez’s conscious and consistent work at honing her craft, her skill at raising the highly political to the level of art, and her engagement with black studies and women’s studies.

In these interviews, we see how her travels, her career as a teacher, and her work as a mother, as a political activist, and as a cultural critic have changed her writing. Her experiences in women’s studies and her friendships with other artists—such as Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe, Margaret Walker, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Amiri Baraka—have all influenced her poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781578069521
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	01/30/2007
Series:	Literary Conversations Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	213
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Joyce A. Joyce is professor of English at Temple University. She is the author of Black Studies as Human Studies: Critical Essays and Interviews; Ijala: Sonia Sanchez and the African Poetic Tradition; Warriors, Conjurers, and Priests: Defining African-centered Literary Criticism, and other books.

Table of Contents

Introduction     ix
Chronology     xxi
Attuned to the Energy: Sonia Sanchez   Anita Cornwell     3
Sonia Sanchez: An Interview   Herbert Leibowitz     6
Interview with Sonia Sanchez   Zala Highsmith-Taylor     17
Form and Spirit: A Conversation with Sonia Sanchez   Annie Finch     27
Interview with Sonia Sanchez   Larvester Gaither     47
An Interview with Sonia Sanchez   Danielle Alyce Rome     62
Sonia Sanchez: Telling What We Must Hear   Juanita Johnson-Bailey     70
"As Poets, As Activists": An Interview with Sonia Sanchez   David Reich     80
Traveling Conversation: India Dennis-Mahmood Interviews Sonia Sanchez   India Dennis-Mahmood     94
Sonia Sanchez Speaks   Cheo Tyehimba     111
Poetics and Politics: A Special Encounter with Sonia Sanchez   Claude Julien   Cecile Coquet   Arlette Frund     117
"This Thing Called Playwrighting": An Interview with Sonia Sanchez on the Art of Her Drama   Jacqueline Wood     127
Sonia Sanchez: The Joy of Writing Poetry   Kadija Sesay     144
An Interview with Sonia Sanchez   Sascha Feinstein     155
Interview with Sonia Sanchez: Poet, Playwright, Teacher, and Intellectual Activist   Joyce A. Joyce     177
Index     207