Homegirls & Handgrenades
Sanchez, Sonia. Homegirls & Handgrenades. Thunder's Mouth Press, 1988 (7th Printing). Softbound. Design and cover design by Loretta Li. Author photo by Rich Addicks. Growing up in both Alabama and Harlem, Sanchez struggled with a speech impediment, which compelled her to pay closer attention to phonetics, providing a grounding that would allow her to blossom into the poet and self-proclaimed 'ordained stutterer' she would eventually grow into. While attending college at NYU, she joined with fellow Black Arts Movement writers Haki Madhubuti, Nikki Giovanni, and Etheridge Knight to form the Broadside Quartet, a group fostered and promoted by Broadside Press publisher Dudley Randall. As a faculty member at San Francisco State University, Sanchez would go on to create the US's first literature course focused around black women, while also publishing influential works like this poetry collection, which is typical of her oeuvre as it looks to forerunners like Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown in its use of spacing and punctuation to approximate the spoken word.
