SONIA SANCHEZ TO GIVE READING AT BRYN MAWR

Award-winning poet, activist and scholar Sonia Sanchez will give a reading at Bryn Mawr College on Tuesday, April 4, at 7:30 p.m. in the Ely Room, Wyndham Alumnae House.

Free and open to the public, Sanchez's appearance is part of the College's yearlong Creative Writing Program Reading Series, which features award-winning poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, and playwrights. For further information, contact the Office for the Arts at 610-526-5210.

Recognized as one of the most important figures in African-American literature, Sonia Sanchez has been called "a lion in literature's forest" by Maya Angelou. Through her poetry, plays, children's books and numerous essays, Sanchez has explored women's lives, the struggles and triumphs of people of color, and global, humanistic themes.

She is the author of 15 books, including Homegirls and Handgrenades, which won the American Book Award, and Does Your House Have Lions?, a chronicle of her brother's battle with AIDS, which won the NAACP Image Award and was nominated for a National Book Critics' Circle Award. In 2001, she received the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, one of the highest honors a poet can achieve.

Born in Birmingham, Ala., Sanchez grew up in Harlem, earned an undergraduate degree at Hunter College and later did postgraduate work at New York University, studying poetry with Louise Bogan. She formed a writers' workshop in Greenwich Village and created the "Broadside Quartet" of young poets. During her years in New York, she became active in the civil-rights movement. In the mid-1960s, she taught at what is now San Francisco State University, and from 1977 until her retirement in 1999, she was a member of Temple University's English faculty and was the university's first Presidential Fellow.

Sanchez has lectured at more than 500 universities and colleges in the United States and has traveled extensively, reading her poetry in Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Cuba, England, Nicaragua, Norway and the People's Republic of China.

Among the many honors she has received are the Peace and Freedom Award from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, a Lucretia Mott Award, the Outstanding Arts Award from the Pennsylvania Coalition of 100 Black Women, and the Community Service Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators.

Her reading at Bryn Mawr is sponsored by a gift from Florence Newman Trefethen, Class of 1943, by the Lucy Martin Donnelly Women Writers Series Fund and by the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.

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