NOVA-Manassas reschedules free evening with Sonia Sanchez, noted poet and writer

On March 6 from 5 to 7 p.m., the Manassas Campus of Northern Virginia Community College will host “An Evening with Sonia Sanchez” in Colgan Theater. The event is free and open to the public with free parking in the student parking lots (Lot B). The campus is at 6901 Sudley Road, Manassas. E-mail .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) for details. The Feb. 25 event has been rescheduled due to illness.

ASanchez is a renowned poet and prolific writer. According to a news release, she is the author of more than 20 books including “Homecoming,” “We a BaddDDD People,” “Love Poems,” “I’ve Been a Woman,” “Homegirls and Handgrenades,” “Under a Soprano Sky,” “Wounded in the House of a Friend,” “Like the Singing Coming off the Drums,” “Shake Loose My Skin” and “Morning Haiku.”

Her book “Does Your House Have Lions?” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the Poetry Society of America’s 2001 Robert Frost Medalist and a Ford Freedom Scholar from the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. She is the recipient of the 2004 Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Year and the National Visionary Leadership Award for 2006. She also received the 2005 Leeway Foundation Transformational Award and the 2009 Robert Creeley Award, the news release noted.

She has received a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Lucretia Mott Award for 1984, the Outstanding Arts Award from the Pennsylvania Coalition of 100 Black Women and the Community Service Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators. She won the 1985 American Book Award for “Homegirls and Handgrenades,” the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities for 1988, the Peace and Freedom Award from Women International League for Peace and Freedom for 1989, a PEW Fellowship in the Arts for 1992-1993 and the Langston Hughes Poetry Award for 1999.

She was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University and she held the Laura Carnell Chair in English at Temple University. Currently, Sanchez is one of 20 African-American women featured in “Freedom Sisters,” an interactive traveling exhibition created by the Cincinnati Museum Center and Smithsonian Institution. In December 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter selected Sanchez as Philadelphia’s first Poet Laureate, calling her “the longtime conscience of the city.”