Sanchez has lectured all over the world on issues of black culture, women’s liberation, peace, and racial justice. She taught for more than two decades at Temple University, where she was the first Presidential Fellow and held the Laura Carnell Chair in English. She is a longstanding sponsor of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and is one of 20 African American women featured in “Freedom Sisters,” an interactive exhibition created by the Cincinnati Museum Center and Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition.

Sanchez’s poetry helped define the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She is the author of more than 16 books, including Morning Haiku (Beacon Press 2010); I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t and Other Plays (Duke University Press 2010), edited by Jacqueline Wood; Homegirls and Handgrenades (White Pine Press, new edition 2007); and Shake Loose My Skin (Beacon Press 1999), among others.

Sanchez is the recipient of a number of awards. 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 received the Robert Creeley award (2009), the Harper Lee Award (2004), the Alabama Distinguished Writer and the National Visionary Leadership Award (2006), the Leeway Foundation Transformational Award (2005), and the Langston Hughes Poetry Award (1990). She also received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (1992-93), the National Endowment for the Arts Lucretia Mott Award (1984), the American Book Award (1985), and the Peace and Freedom Award from Women International League for Peace and Freedom (1989), among others.