Sonia Sanchez: A Love Letter to the Poet Who Shaped My Voice

Dear Ms. Sonia Sanchez,

By the time I found myself in a crowded room listening to you recite one of your grand poems, your enchantment had already drawn me inward.

Your poetry showed me early on that verses can cradle our humanity, our fears, and our hope, carried in a rhythm flexible enough to bend, break, and then be rebuilt. It’s a cadence I would reach for as soon as I began writing poetry.

As a teenager navigating the foster-care system in California, I had embraced poetry as my preferred mode of written expression. Dr. Thema Bryant once said that one of poetry’s remarkable powers is that it lets you write in code and share as much or as little as you want while still giving voice to what cannot be spoken. She captured why I chose poetry over any other form of writing.

Writing poetry allowed me to begin finding my own voice even while I was still too young to fully grasp or tell my entire story. I didn’t yet have the language for what I had lived through—only my observations and the sense that there was power in laying those feelings out on the page. 

One of my poems from that period, “Eyes Like Mine,” emerged from interactions with other foster kids and recognizing something in their eyes that echoed what I felt in mine, long before any of us had the maturity or words to describe the horrors we’d survived.

My years in Philadelphia as a student at the University of Pennsylvania overlapped with the end of your tenure in the late ’90s as a professor at Temple University. I was across town, studying Afro-American studies, strengthening my understanding of who we are as a people. Deeply immersed in learning about our history, language, and culture, I was steering myself toward a career in journalism.

Once again, your work and your example were central to my ongoing education and also to my approach to writing. The fearlessness of your words and your commitment to honoring Harriet Tubman appear in how you reimagined her as a force moving through the world, pulling her out of the past and presenting her as the remarkable heroine she was.  

Picture a woman riding thunder on the legs of slavery….. Picture her kissing our spines saying no to the yes of slavery… picture her rotating the earth into a shape of lives becoming…..

Students who sat in your classrooms carry you with them into rooms you have never entered. I’m proud to say you offered me a second classroom. Your words and a core part of your ethos have traveled with me into the many rooms I have entered, and have guided me in deciding which ones were worth fighting to stay in. 

We can be anything we want… for we are the young ones… walken without footprints… woven our bodies in tune to songs.. Hi echoen us. The beautiful black ones…. 

 WE WILL BE ALL that we want.. For we are the young ones… bringen the world to a Black Beginnen…. 

Your contributions in shaping the Black Arts Movement will continue to resonate for generations to come. It is because of your dedication to insisting that Black studies be incorporated into the curricula of colleges and universities that I was able to choose Afro-American Studies as my major. 

You have taught me that for true creatives, activism and art naturally go hand in hand. They are forms of resistance and ways for us to process our world, advocate for a better one, and do so without abandoning hope, all while taking time to remind ourselves of our blessed humanity. 

Part of our culture is our audacity to love with all our hearts. Another part is found in our struggle, whether it is the ongoing fight for justice and equality, or the ways racism and lack of opportunity settle into how we show up and how we view our place in the world. 

I see you blackboy… bent toward destruction watching… for death with tight eyes…

Somewhere along the line, as I shifted toward the “if it bleeds, it leads” approach of breaking news journalism, I drifted away from poetry. In my early career, I believed that breaking news required a language built on speaking truth to power with precision rather than metaphor, on writing, explaining, and reporting with such specificity that it demanded the opposite of the expansiveness and fluidity—and other elements—that make a poem great.

Of all things, it was Def Poetry Jam on Broadway that drew me back to poetry, and later, your work. I watched Def Poetry Jam on Broadway at least half a dozen times. Each viewing rekindled my love for poetry and refreshed my understanding of its power.

I gradually understood that my favorite journalists—the ones I aimed to emulate—were gifted writers who knew how evocative language and a well-placed turn of phrase could illuminate truth.

After all, our job as journalists, or at least our ideal, is to report the best and worst of humanity in ways that tell the story with such clarity that the truth, even when it contains unimaginable horrors, does the heavy lifting on its own.

That realization and the sober understanding it brought me back to the language you so exquisitely model. I found a place for that cadence and approach in my reporting, using it to foreground people’s humanity over their circumstances, to cultivate empathy, spur action, and kindle curiosity about how much of ourselves we share with one another. 

So when I sat down to write this, it felt entirely fitting that a love letter should be the form. You spent decades composing love letters to us in your poems and in your performances, and so now it seems only right to return one in kind. This is a love note, long overdue. 

Every generation of Black writers and poets who has arisen after you has inherited something from you: your words and your devotion. You have given all of us permission to write in our own rhythm, to love language, ourselves, and each other without apology, faults and all. You’ve given us permission to bend language and let words drift, pause, and bop across the page.
It is with pride that I carry that inheritance into my own work and daily life whenever I write about us, for us, in my unique voice, revealing hard truths while always leaving room for hope, love, and a brighter future. 

We gon be some beautiful/black/women… gon move like the queens we be…. We gon be some badddDDD people… just you wait and see…. 

With love and gratitude,

Nicky