Poet Sonia Sanchez, the author of more than 17 volumes of verse, will receive the Edward MacDowell Medal at a ceremony on the MacDowell grounds at 100 High St. in Peterborough on Sunday, July 10.
The return of the outdoor public celebration, including introductory remarks by novelist and MacDowell Fellow Walter Mosley and picnicking on the grounds, will be the first since August 2019.
“I had tears in my eyes as I learned about this award,” stated Sanchez, a leading figure of the Black Arts Movement. “When I consider my dear friend, sister Toni (Morrison), and so many others who have been given this award, I feel so welcomed to be part of that group. It is a great honor to be this year’s awardee. MacDowell has such a great herstory and history of caring and concern for artists; it is a joy this place exists to keep the world on a path toward re-civilization, peace and humanity.”
The author and international lecturer on Black culture and literature, women’s liberation, peace and racial justice joins MacDowell Medal winners such as Robert Frost (1962), Georgia O’Keeffe (1972), Leonard Bernstein (1987), Louise Bourgeois (1990), I.M. Pei (1998), Sonny Rollins (2010), Stephen Sondheim (2013), Toni Morrison (2016), Art Spiegelman (2018), Charles Gaines (2019) and Rosanne Cash (2021).
Sanchez is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, children’s literature and plays, including “We a BaddDDD People,” “Homegirls and Handgrenades” (winner of the 1985 American Book Award), “Under a Soprano Sky,” “Does Your House Have Lions?” “Like the Singing Coming off the Drums,” “Shake Loose My Skin” and “Morning Haiku.”
“Sonia Sanchez’s illustrious career spans seven decades. Her commanding oeuvre continues to elevate language’s ability to give voice to entire communities (their daily pleasures and pains) inside our shared and troubled history,” stated Claudia Rankine, a MacDowell Fellow and chair of this year’s MacDowell Medal selection panel. “A founding member of the Black Arts Movement, this poet, activist, scholar and American treasure is, without doubt, a major figure in the landscape of American letters.”
Rankine was joined on the medal selection panel by MacDowell Fellow and board member Vijay Seshadri and poets and essayists Erica Hunt, NuarAlsadir, Jericho Brown and David St. John.
“The magnificent Sonia Sanchez – lifelong poet, crafter of the complex and the clear, the hard and the beautiful – acknowledges who we are on this earth through American eras hopeful, frightening and imponderable,” stated Nell Painter, MacDowell board chair, fellow and best-selling author. “She is an eloquent international figure, helping us understand the world. Over our many decades, I have looked up to Sonia Sanchez as bard and also as a forger of the new intellectual field of Black studies that has remade our consciousness.”
A sponsor of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Sanchez’s awards include the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry, the Langston Hughes Poetry Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the 1985 Lucretia Mott Award, the 2004 Harper Lee Award, the 2009 Robert Creeley Award, the 2018 Wallace Stevens Award, the 2019 Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2021 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.
In December 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter selected Sanchez as Philadelphia’s first poet laureate. Her other books include “Homecoming,” “Love Poems,” “I’ve Been a Woman,” “A Sound Investment and Other Stories,” “Wounded in the House of a Friend” and most recently “Collected Poems.” In addition to being a contributing editor to The Black Scholar and The Journal of African Studies, she has edited the anthology “We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans.” “BMa: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review” is the first African-American journal that discusses the work of Sanchez and the Black Arts Movement.
Mosley will introduce Sanchez during the celebration, speaking to her impact on the culture, and Painter will present her with the award.
The MacDowell Medal, which has rotated annually among all disciplines practiced at MacDowell, has been awarded since 1960 to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to American culture. Its presentation, which often draws more than 1,200 visitors from around the country to MacDowell’s 450-acre wooded campus, offers the public the opportunity to visit 32 open, working studios to see art being created and speak to its creators on the one day each year that MacDowell is open to the public. The event is free.
For information, visit macdowell.org. For information on event sponsorship or tickets, contact Brett Evan Solomon events@macdowell.org.