Poet, teacher and activist Sonia Sanchez received the 62nd Edward MacDowell Medal Sunday at MacDowell’s first fully in-person Medal Day ceremony since 2019.
For the past 50 years, Sanchez has been a prominent playwright, professor and poet whose words and actions gave voice to the Black community as she worked to foster love, community and cultural change.
To the crowd of hundreds gathered under the big white tent on MacDowell’s back lawn, Sanchez spoke of an increasingly fractured America, embodied by ongoing attacks on racial equality and women’s rights. And, she spoke of the solution, of how to put the pieces back together – by listening.
“I want to thank MacDowell for putting this out into the universe, that it is possible – is it not? – for us all to listen to many different voices,” Sanchez said. “It is possible, even if we don’t always agree with everything, just to hear the beauty, or the concern, about ‘This is my country too.’…I may not want to marry you. I don’t even want to live next door to you, necessarily – but I do want you there when that trumpet is sounded that we’ve got to gather together and save democracy and the place called America.”
Sanchez started out teaching grade school in New York City in the 1960s; since then, she has taught at several universities and lectured at hundreds more, helping found previously nonexistent Black Studies programs. She has rubbed elbows with Black Panthers, Malcolm X and Mumia Abu-Jamal, recorded music with Diana Ross and Tupac Shakur and received awards bestowed in honor of Robert Frost, Harper Lee and Langston Hughes.
Author Walter Mosley introduced Sanchez, emphasizing her commitment to truth, love and the fight for freedom.
“She, Ms. Sanchez, encompasses the history and hope of Black culture in America and Africa, in South America and the Caribbean – anywhere where the slave routes once flourished and flourish still,” Mosley said. “She is our poet, playwright, songstress, storyteller, dancer, mother to her own children and any other motherless spirit who passes near her…She’s an ordained stutterer, a titan, a revolutionary and a dedicated daughter who has known sacrifice the way a warrior does, protecting her blood with her life.”
Sanchez, 87, overcame her battles with “Miss Vertigo” to make her way to the MacDowell stage Sunday afternoon to speak off-the-cuff about the direction America is headed, giving a stern warning about the issues our nation faces.
“What does it mean to be human?” Sanchez asked. “Unless we answer that question, there will not be another century. That is a question that must be looked squarely in the face now, period.”
MacDowell board chair Nell Painter handed Sanchez the Edward MacDowell Medal, the 62nd such award in the 115-year-history of the Peterborough artists’ retreat. Sanchez joins such luminaries as Toni Morrison, Leonard Bernstein and Georgia O’Keefe as medal recipients.
It was the first fully in-person Medal Day ceremony since 2019. COVID canceled the 2020 award ceremony altogether, and the 61st medal, awarded to singer/songwriter Rosanne Cash, was handed out in a smaller ceremony last year, minus the traditional picnic lunches and once-a-year tour of the artists’ residential studios.
“At long last, we are assembled in real space and time, the way human beings are meant to be together, side by side and in celebration,” said MacDowell Executive Director Philip Himberg. “I actually see today as a kind of jubilee, as we emerge into this daylight, as a reminder of art’s power to transform the world.”
Following her speech, Sanchez performed a spoken-word piece backed up by bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma before MacDowell Resident Director David Macy turned the crowd loose for their lunches on the lawn and subsequent studio tour.