Poet, playwright, educator, and activist Sonia Sanchez is the author of seventeen books including Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, Under a Soprano Sky, Wounded in the House of a Friend, Does Your House Have Lions? Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums, Shake Loose My Skin and most recently, Collected Poems. Among hundreds of honors she has received are the Langston Hughes Poetry Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Edward MacDowell Medal, and the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award.

Homegirls & Handgrenades won the 1985 American Book award, and Does Your House Have Lions? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Sonia Sanchez has taught and lectured at over 500 universities and colleges in the United States and has traveled extensively, reading her poetry in Africa, Australia, Cuba, England, the Caribbean, Norway, Canada, and the People's Republic of China. She was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she held the Laura Carnell Chair in English until her retirement in 1999.