Guides: Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) & the ULS Collection: Marilyn Nelson and Sonia Sanchez

November 14, 2019 Event - Marilyn Nelson and Sonia Sanchez

Sonia Sanchez and Marilyn Nelson

Reading and conversation with Marilyn Nelson, author or translator of seventeen poetry books and the memoir How I Discovered Poetry, and winner of the Robert Frost Medal and Guggenheim and NEA fellowships; and Sonia Sanchez, legendary writer of the Black Arts Movement, author of sixteen books and recipient of awards including the Peace and Freedom Award from the Women International League for Peace and Freedom, the Robert Frost Medal, and the Langston Hughes Poetry Award. Co-presented by Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures.

Location and Address: Carnegie Library Lecture Hall, 4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Related Events:

Marilyn Nelson’s Ed Ochester Lecture: Masterclass on the Sonnet
November 12, 2019 - 2:00pm to 2:45pm
Masterclass with acclaimed poet & translator.

Co-lab: Marilyn Nelson Work-in-Progress
November 13, 2019 - 6:00pm
Marilyn Nelson shares work in progress with responses from students in the course Studio in African American Poetry and Poetics.

Hands-on Community Workshop with Sonia Sanchez
November 15, 2019 - 6:30pm
Presented in partnership with August Wilson House and Hill District CEC.
Blakey Program Center, 1908 Wylie Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15219

Marilyn Nelson

Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of seventeen poetry books and the memoir How I Discovered Poetry. She is also the author of The Fields Of Praise: New And Selected Poems, which won the 1998 Poets’ Prize, Carver: A Life In Poems, which won the 2001 Boston Globe/Hornbook Award and the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, and Fortune’s Bones, which was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. Nelson’s honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Frost Medal. She was the Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut from 2001-2006.

Sonia Sanchez

Sonia Sanchez is a renowned scholar, poet, playwright and activist who has been an influential force in African American literary and political culture for over three decades. One of the most important writers of the Black Arts Movement, Sanchez is the author of sixteen books including Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems, and Shake Loose My Skin.

Morning Haiku by Sonia Sanchez
Call Number: PS3569.A468 M67 2010
Publication Date: 2010
This new volume by the much-loved poet Sonia Sanchez, her first in over a decade, is music to the ears: a collection of haiku that celebrates the gifts of life and mourns the deaths of revered African American figures in the worlds of music, literature, art, and activism. Item number: 31735060891557
Wounded in the House of a Friend by Sonia Sanchez
Call Number: PS3569 A468 W68 1995
Publication Date: 1995
In her first book in eight years, Sonia Sanchez offers a powerful exploration of personal and shared pain. With passion and precision, Wounded in the House of a Friend confronts issues of rape, race, and gender and grapples with the assault of emotions spawned by betrayals of the mind and spirit - a husband's infidelity, a rape, a granddaughter's drug addiction, the divisions invoked by racism. Item number: 31735035470370
A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women by Sonia Sanchez
Call Number: PS3569.A468 B5
Publication Date: 1974
Item number: 31735008463154
Homegirls and Handgrenades by Sonia Sanchez
Call Number: PS3569.A468 H64 1984
Publication Date: 1984
A new edition of the 1985 winner of the American Book Award. In a style that is hers alone, Sanchez brings poetry and politics together into a book whose whole is far greater than the sum of its arts. Some of the poems are plaintive, others militant, but all are significant, brilliant and original. Item number: 31735007120508
I've Been a Woman by Sonia Sanchez
Call Number: PS3569.A468 I9
ISBN: 9780933296015
Publication Date: 1978
The dynamic transcendental female voice of one of the finest poets of our time. Includes "Black Magic: Blk Rhetoric" and "Blues." Item number: 31735008463220
Ash by Sharan Strange
Call Number: PS3569.T691229 A9 2001
ISBN: 0807068632
Publication Date: 2001
Introduction by Sonia Sanchez. Sharan Strange's poetry brings to life the lush mysteries and brutalities of growing up in a rural Southern town. Item number: 31735042954044
Home Coming by Sonia Sanchez
Call Number: PS3569.A468 H6
Publication Date: 1969
An early book of poems from a prolific, award-winning poet and one of the most prominent writers in the Black Arts movement. . Item number: 31735008463196
Love Poems by Sonia Sanchez
Call Number: PS3569.A468 L6
ISBN: 089388104X
Publication Date: 1973
An early book of poems from a prolific, award-winning poet and one of the most prominent writers in the Black Arts movement. . Item number: 31735025498423
Does Your House Have Lions? by Sonia Sanchez
Call Number: PS3569 A468D64 1997
ISBN: 0807068306
Publication Date: 1997
Explores the life of Sonia Sanchez's brother - a vibrant young man who left the South for New York, immersed himself in the city's gay subculture, and became a victim of AIDS in the first years of the pandemic. Told in the voices of sister, brother, father, mother, and ancestors, it is the story of kin estranged and then finally brought together by their shared history of loss, separation, and pain. Item number: 31735039101807
I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't and Other Plays by Sonia Sanchez; Jacqueline Wood (Editor)
Call Number: PS3569.A468 I445 2010
ISBN: 9780822347781
Publication Date: 2010
This collection brings her plays together in one volume for the first time. Like her poetry, Sanchez's plays voice her critique of the racism and sexism that she encountered as a young female writer in the black militant community in the late 1960s and early 1970s, her ongoing concern with the well-being of the black community, and her commitment to social justice. Item number: 31735060577362
Under a Soprano Sky by Sonia Sanchez
Call Number: PS3569 A468U53 1987
ISBN: 0865430535
Publication Date: 1987
This collection of poems by Sonia Sanchez suggests feminist concerns around which these poems revolve. The many haiku, narrative, and elegies in these poems contain Sanchez's own brand of Afro-American lyricism, and range in tone from anger, to cynicism, to reverence. Item number: 31735023355526
Bum Rush the Page by Louis Reyes Rivera (Editor); Sonia Sanchez (Foreword by); Tony Medina (Editor)
Call Number: PS615 .B86 2001
ISBN: 0609808400
Publication Date: 2001
Foreword by Sonia Sanchez. Bum Rush the Page is a groundbreaking collection, capturing the best new work from the poets who have brought fresh energy, life, and relevance to American poetry. Item number: 31735042892277

Magnificat by Marilyn N. Waniek
Call Number: PS3573.A4795 M29 1994
Publication Date: 1994
A collection of new poems which deal with spiritual and physical love. Item number: 31735032691515
Freedom Business by Marilyn Nelson; Deborah Muirhead (Illustrator)
Call Number: PS3573.A4795 F74 2008
ISBN: 9781932425574
Publication Date: 2008
The true narrative of a slave from Africa, crafted in verse by Marilyn Nelson. Born an African prince, Broteer Furro was captured by slave traders at age six. As he stepped onto a cargo ship, the vessel's steward purchased the boy and gave him a new name: Venture. He landed in Rhode Island and worked through a lifetime of slavery to buy not only his own freedom but the freedom of his wife and children. In this breathtaking volume, Marilyn Nelson's poems sit opposite the text of Smith's own narrative. Nelson's controlled verse layers this edition with insight into Smith's stoic eighteenth-century prose. Item number: 31735066863444
The Thirteenth Month by Marilyn Nelson (Translator); Inge Pedersen
Call Number: PT8176.26.E283 T49 2005
ISBN: 0932440363
Publication Date: 2005
This collection introduces Danish Poet Inge Pedersen to English-speaking audiences in beautiful translations by the distinguished American poet/translator Marilyn Nelson. Readers will appreciate the lyricism and realism of one of Europe's finest poets. Item number: 31735053663765
The Homeplace by Marilyn Nelson
Call Number: PS3573.H4795 H6 1990
ISBN: 0807116416
Publication Date: 1990
Finalist for the 1991 National Book Award. In The Homeplace, the stories of a family become the history of a people as Marilyn Nelson Waniek sketches the lives descended from her great-great-grandmother Diverne. Throughout The Homeplace, the reader is involved in a series of sharply portrayed lives. By telling a continuous story in a mix of free verse and traditional forms, Waniek gives her work pace and intensity. Item number: 31735025140728
The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems by Marilyn Nelson
Call Number: PS3573.A4795 C33 2005
ISBN: 0807130648
Publication Date: 2005
Soaring images, rhythmic language, and wry humor come together in these three narrative poems that explore travel from an African American historical and social perspective. In rhymed couplets, each pilgrim tells a story, and the result is a rollicking, sensual exploration of spirit and community, with a nod to Chaucer and to traditional Trickster tales. Using her remarkable ability to educate and inspire, Marilyn Nelson demonstrates the power of travel to transform our imaginations. Item number: 31735051833410
Faster Than Light by Marilyn Nelson
Call Number: PS3573.A4795 F37 2012
ISBN: 9780807147337
Publication Date: 2012
Conjuring numerous voices and characters across oceans and centuries, Faster Than Light explores widely disparate experiences through the lens of traditional poetic forms. This volume contains a selection of Marilyn Nelson's new and uncollected poems as well as work from each of her lyric histories of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century African American individuals and communities. Item number: 31735071906105
For the Body. Poems by Marilyn Nelson Waniek
Call Number: PS3573.A4795 F6
ISBN: 9780807104644
Publication Date: 1978
An early book of poems from one of America's most honored writers - a Newbery Honor medalist, Coretta Scott King Medalist and National Book Award nominee. Item number: 31735007128055
My Seneca Village by Marilyn Nelson
Call Number: PS3573.A4795 A6 2015
ISBN: 9781608981960
Publication Date: 2015
Poetry illustrated in the poet's own words - with brief prose descriptions of what she sees inside her work -- this exquisite collection takes readers back in time and deep into the mind's eye of Marilyn Nelson. She draws upon history, and her astonishing imagination, to revive the long lost community of Seneca Village in Manhattan. Item number: 31735071907533
The Fields of Praise by Marilyn Nelson
Call Number: PS3564 E469F54 1997
ISBN: 0807121746
Publication Date: 1997
In The Fields of Praise, Marilyn Nelson claims as subjects the life of the spirit, the vicissitudes of love, and the African American experience and arranges them as white pebbles marking our common journey. Nelson is a poet of power, able to bring alive the most rarefied and subtle of experiences. Item number: 31735038469262
Mama's Promises by Marilyn Nelson
Call Number: PS3573.A4795 M3 1985
ISBN: 080711250X
Publication Date: 1985
Marilyn Nelson Waniek writes with great wisdom and compassion. Grounded but never earthbound, her poems speak honestly and eloquently about giving birth, nurturing life, and facing death; they inhabit the present, fully aware of their responsibilities to the past and the future. Nelson leaves us with the affecting strength and assurance of lasting things. Item number: 31735010358285