Join us for "An Evening With Sonia Sanchez," a fundraising event for the Keystone Honors Academy. All proceeds support scholarships for students in the Keystone Honors Academy.
Lecture/Reading/Book Signing at 7:00 in Marian Anderson Auditorium on the Cheyney University Campus – Admission is FREE
The Keystone Honors Academy is a dynamic educational initiative for academically talented students who are serious about their education and preparing for the future. The program serves a diverse body of students of low socioeconomic status. The honors academy’s persistence rate is 82% and the program graduates students at a rate that is twice that of the national average for African Americans. There are more than 1,000 alumni of the Keystone Honors Academy, and they are employed in the public and private sectors, spanning the fields of medicine and health, business, law, education, and public administration.
The honors program takes a holistic approach to student development, and provides the necessary support to enhance the success potential of its students. The honors program encompasses scholarship assistance, extended pre-professional and cultural programming, a living learning center, and extensive graduate school preparation. This approach has shown to be particularly effective, and has had a direct impact on student placement rates in graduate programs and in professional modes of employment.
Sonia Sanchez is the author of over 20 books including Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, Love Poems, I’ve Been a Woman, A Sound Investment and Other Stories, Homegirls and Handgrenades, Under a Soprano Sky, Wounded in the House of a Friend (Beacon Press 1995), Does Your House Have Lions? (Beacon Press, 1997), Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (Beacon Press, 1998), Shake Loose My Skin (Beacon Press, 1999) and most recently, Morning Haiku (Beacon Press, 2010). In addition to being a contributing editor to Black Scholar and The Journal of African Studies, she has edited an anthology, We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans. BMA: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review is the first African American Journal that discusses the work of Sonia Sanchez and the Black Arts Movement. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucretia Mott Award for 1984, the Outstanding Arts Award from the Pennsylvania Coalition of 100 Black Women, the Community Service Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, she is a winner of 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 (W.I.L.P.F.) for 1989, a PEW Fellowship in the Arts for 1992-1993 and the recipient of Langston Hughes Poetry Award for 1999. 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.