Poet, educator, and activist Sonia Sanchez has received the $80,000 Jackson Poetry Prize, a prestigious addition to her recent lifetime achievement honors, including the $250,000 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. This year’s judges—poets Mary Jo Bang, Marilyn Chin, and Claudia Rankine—said of the impact of Sanchez’s work: “Her vast and commanding oeuvre of published poetry invokes the power and revolutionary properties of language itself—intoning the struggles and joys of entire communities while reinvigorating traditional forms.... Sonia Sanchez is a national treasure.”

Sanchez was a founding member of the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s, and she is widely regarded as a pioneering teacher of Black studies. Her poetry collections include Homecoming, Love Poems, and Shake Loose My Skin.

The Writer’s Chronicle is proud to be featuring Sonia Sanchez in our Fall 2022 issue.