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African-American Poet Sonia Sanchez 1934

Sonia Sanchez is an African American poet most often associated with the Black Arts Movement. She has authored over a dozen books of poetry, as well as plays and children's books. She was a 1993 Pew Fellowships in the Arts.

Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver in Birmingham, Alabama on September 9, 1934. When Sanchez was only a year old, her mother died and Sanchez was sent to live with her paternal grandmother. She then lived with family and friends until 1941, when she moved to Harlem to live with her father, her sister, and her stepmother who was her father's third wife. In 1955, she received a B.A. in Political Science from Hunter College, where she had also taken several creative writing courses. Later, Sanchez completed postgraduate work at New York University where she studied poetry with Louise Bogan. Although her first marriage to Albert Sanchez did not last, Sonia Sanchez would retain her professional name. Sanchez then married poet Etheridge Knight. They later divorced. In 1972, she joined the Nation of Islam, but left the organization after three years in 1975 because her views on women's rights conflicted with theirs. She has three children and 3 grandchildren.

Career

Sanchez has taught as a professor at eight universities and has lectured at over 500 college campuses across the US, including Howard University. She advocated the introduction of Black Studies courses in California. Sanchez was the first to create and teach a course based on Black Women and literature in the United States. Sanchez was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University where she began working in 1977, where she held the Laura Carnell chair until her retirement in 1999. She is currently a poet-in-residence at Temple University. She has read her poetry in Africa, the Caribbean, China, Australia, Europe, Nicaragua, Canada, and Cuba. Sanchez has also appeared on Bill Cosby's CBS show in the 1990s.

Sanchez is a member of the Plowshares, the Brandywine Peace Community and MADRE. She also supports MOMS AND in Alabama and the National Black United Front. Sanchez was a very influential part of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Arts Movement. Sanchez was an advocate for the people. She was a member of CORE (Congress for Racial Equality), where she met Malcolm X. She wrote many plays and books that had to do with the struggles and lives of Black America. Sanchez has edited two anthologies on Black literature, We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans and 360° of Blackness Coming at You.

Sanchez is also known for her innovative melding of musical formats - like the blues - and traditional poetic formats like haiku and tanka. She also tends to use incorrect spelling to get her point across.

In 1969, Sanchez was awarded the P.E.N. Writing Award. She was awarded the National Education Association Award 1977-1988. She also won the National Academy and Arts Award and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Award in 1978-1979. In 1985, she was awarded the American Book Award for Homegirls and Handgrenades. She has also been awarded the Community Service Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the Lucretia Mott Award, the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Humanities, and the Peace and Freedom Award from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Bibliography

Poetry

  • Homecoming, Broadside Press, 1969
  • We a Baddddd People (1970), Broadside Press, 1973
  • Love Poems, Third Press, 1973
  • A Blues Book for a Blue Black Magic Woman, Broadside Press, 1974
  • Autumn Blues
  • Continuous Fire: A Collection of Poetry
  • Shake Down Memory: A Collection of Political Essays and Speeches
  • It's a New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs (1971)
  • Homegirls and Handgrenades(1985) (reprint White Pine Press, 2007, ISBN 9781893996809)
  • Under a Soprano Sky, Africa World Press, 1987, ISBN 9780865430525
  • I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems, Third World Press, 1985, ISBN 9780883781128
  • Wounded in the House of a Friend, Beacon Press, 1995, ISBN 9780807068267
  • Does Your House have Lions, Beacon Press, 1997, ISBN 9780807068304
  • Like the Singing Coming Off of Drums, Beacon Press, 1998
  • Shake Loose My Skin. Beacon Press. 2000. ISBN 9780807068533.
  • Ash(2001)
  • Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (2001)
  • Morning Haiku. Beacon Press. 2010. ISBN 9780807069103.

Plays

  • Black Cats and Uneasy Landings
  • I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't (1982)
  • The Bronx is Next (1970)
  • Sista Son/Ji (1972)
  • Uh Huh, But How Do It Free Us? (1975)
  • Malcolm Man/Don't Live Here No More (1979)
  • I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't and Other Plays (Duke University Press, 2010)

Children's Books

  • It's a New Day
  • A Sound Investment
  • The Adventures of Fat Head, Small Head, and Square Head, The Third Press, 1973, ISBN 9780893880941

Anthologies

  • We Be Word Sorcerers
  • 360 Degrees of Blackness Coming at Ya!
  • Robert Bly, David Lehman, ed (1999). The Best American poetry, 1999. Scribner. ISBN 9780684842806.
  • Junot Díaz, ed (2001). "A Poem for My Father". The Beacon Best of 2001: great writing by women and men of all colors and cultures. Beacon Press. ISBN 9780807062395.
  • Arnold Rampersad, Hilary Herbold, ed (2006). "answer to yo / question of am i not yo / woman even if you went on shit again". The Oxford anthology of African-American poetry. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195125634.

Interviews

  • Joyce Ann Joyce, ed (2007). Conversations with Sonia Sanchez. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 9781578069521.

Discography

  • A Sun Lady for All Seasons Reads Her Poetry (Folkways Records, 1971)
  • Every Tone a Testimony (Smithsonian Folkways, 2001)

Indian Poet Bharatendu Harishchandra 1850

Bharatendu Harishchandra (भारतेन्दु हरिश्चन्द्र) (September 9, 1850 – January 6, 1885) is known as the father of modern Hindi literature as well as Hindi theatre. He is considered one of the greatest Hindi writers of modern India. A recognized poet, he was also a trend setter in Hindi prose-writing. As an author of several dramas, life sketches and travel accounts, Bharatendu Harishchandra represents the agonies of the people, country's poverty, dependency, inhuman exploitation, the unrest of the middle class and the urge for the progress of the country.

Born in Banaras, Bharatendu Harishchandra's father Gopal Chandra was a poet. He wrote poems under the pseudonym Girdhar Das. Bharatendu's parents died when he was still young but they seem to have had an influence on him. Acharya Ramchandra Shukla has described how Bharatendu went to the Jagannath temple in Puri, Orissa with his family in 1865, when he was merely fifteen years of age. It was during this trip that he was influenced by the Bengal Renaissance and decided to bring the genres of social, historical, and Puranic plays and novels into Hindi. This influence reflected in his Hindi translation of the Bengali drama Vidyasundar, just three years later, in 1868.

Bharatendu devoted his life to the development of Hindi literature. In recognition of his services as a writer, patron and modernizer, the title of "Bharatendu" was conferred on him at a public meeting by scholars of Kashi in 1880. Reputed literary critic Ramvilas Sharma refers to the "great literary awakening ushered in under Bharatendu's leadership" as the "second storey of the edifice of renascent Hindi," the first being the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

Bharatendu Harishchandra was multi-faceted. He made major contributions in the field of journalism, drama, and poetry. He edited the magazines Kavi Vachan Sudha, Harishchandra Patrika, Harishchandra Magazine and Bal Vodhini. He was a member of the Chowdhury family of Varanasi belonging to the Agrawal community and his home there is still in use. His ancestors were landlords in Bengal. He had one daughter. He wrote the widely mentioned history of the Agrawal community.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting of India gives Bharatendu Harishchandra Awards since 1983 to promote original writings in Hindi mass communication.

His great granddaughter Pratibha Agarwal, (b. 1930), a Hindi writer, co-founded theatre group Anamika in Kolkata in 1955, with theatre director Shyamanand Jalan, which played a pioneering role in the revival of Hindi theatre and later remained director of Natya Sodha Sansthan.

Major works

Drama-

Bharatendu Harishchandra entered in theatre activity as an actor and soon become director, manager, and playwright. He used theatre as a tool to aware Indian society. his major plays are-

1-Vaidiki himsa hitnsa na bhavati ,1873 ( वैदिक हिंसा हिसा न भवति )

2-Bharat durdasha ,1875 (भारत दुर्दशा)

3-The mythological classic Satya Harishchandra i.e. `Truthful Harishchandra` in 1876

4-Neel devi ,1881 (नीलदेवी)

5-The political Andher nagari i.e. City of Darkness in 1881 (अंधेर नगरी ) -One of the most popular plays of modern Hindi drama. Translated and performed in many Indian languages by prominent Indian directors like B. V. Karanth, Prasanna, Arvind Gaur and Sanjay Upadyaye.Andher nagari is a powerful political satire with universal appeal.

Poetry

Bhagat sarvagya ( भक्तसर्वस्व), Prem malika ( प्रेममालिका,रचनाकाल १८७१), Prem Maduri (प्रेम माधुरी ,१८७५), Prem Tarang (प्रेम-तरंग,१८७७), Utrarat Bhagat Mal ( उत्तरार्द्ध भक्तमाल,१८७६-७७), Prem Pralap (प्रेम-प्रलाप`) (१८७७), Holi(होली)(१८७९), Madu Mukul ( मधुमुकुल) (१८८१), Raag Sangraah ( राग-संग्रह,१८८०), Varsha Vinod ( वर्षा-1950 5455विनोद,१८८०), Vinya Prem Pachassa (विनय प्रेम पचासा,१८८१), Pholo ka Guchha (फूलों का गुच्छा,१८८२), Chandravali in 1876,Prem fuhalwari (प्रेम फुलवारी,१८८३) and Krishan Charitra(कृष्णचरित्र,१८८३)।

Translations

Harsha's Ratnavali, Visakhadattas Mudra-Rakshasa (मुद्राराक्षस), Vidya-Sundar (विद्यासुन्दर), from Bengali, Kapoor mnajari (कपूरमंजरी)from Prakrat and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice as Durlabh bandhu i.e. Invaluable Friend, incomplete.

Essay collection

Bharatendu Grnthaaolly (साहित्य हरिश्चंद्र ),1885

Couplets

The following two rhyming couplets are taken from his famous poem, मातृ-भाषा के प्रति (For the Sake of Mother-Tongue or Towards Mother-Tongue). The poem has ten couplets in total. The poet asserts the importance of using mother tongue as a medium of instruction – conversational and educational.

निज भाषा उन्नति अहै, सब उन्नति को मूल ।
बिन निज भाषा-ज्ञान के, मिटत न हिय को सूल ।। विविध कला शिक्षा अमित, ज्ञान अनेक प्रकार।
सब देसन से लै करहू, भाषा माहि प्रचार ।। Translation:
Progress is made in one's own language (the mother tongue), as it the foundation of all progress.
Without the knowledge of the mother tongue, there is no cure for the pain of heart. Many arts and education infinite, knowledge of various kinds.
Should be taken from all countries, but propagated in one mother tongue.

Play on Bharatendu Harishchandra

Kannada writer and director Prasanna wrote & directed a play Seema Paar on Bharatendu for National School of Drama rep as tribute to Kashi and one of its greatest dramatists, Bharatendu Harishchandra and inevitably thus an involvement with death. For nowhere else is the end of life as palpable as on the Ghats of Kashi and few other lives as closely bound up with death as that of Bharatendu, the father of modern Hindi drama. The lilting dialects of Eastern Uttar Pradesh employed by players of Bharatendu’s theatre company and the typical patois of Kashi spoken by its denizens enliven the play.