Sonia Sanchez is known for her contributions as a poet, activist, dramatist, educationist, and a champion of African American culture. She is regarded worldwide as “a living legend,” a revered female writer of the Black community (Wood 2010, xi). Like Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Jean Toomer and Margaret Walker, with whom she is compared, Sanchez has opened a “space in American letters where the racial self may be heard, affirmed, and strengthened” (Andrews, Foster, and Harris 1997, 643). Her poetics and politics are inseparable. As she recalled in 2000: “The cultural thing, I think, was the existence of us as black folk in a place that did not speak well of us, a country that not only had enslaved us but afterward had ignored us—had segregated us and conspired to keep us from learning even the simplest things” (Sanchez and Kelly 2017, 1034). Sanchez, alongside her fellow revolutionary Black Arts poets, frequently saw her activism questioned: “[People asked,] Why do you agitate? You have brains, talent, education. You can find a nice comfortable niche and forget about others” (quoted in Randall 1970, 9). But to find a nice comfortable niche was to negate or compromise her blackness and to forget about the systematic discrimination of African Americans, her “brothers” and “sisters,” who were deprived of a comfortable niche.

Sanchez's lifelong sociopolitical activism has earned diverse praise. Nicole Moore (2010, 2) argues that Sanchez “infuses her writing with the type of historical and cultural significance and power that makes each word sharp as a razor blade and as hard as any Tupac [Shakur] lyric.” Essence magazine has called her poetry “a must for all readers,” while writer, poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, has called Sanchez “a lion in literature's forest” (Leopold 2013, para. 4). Reflecting on herself, Sanchez says, “[a]s a poet, I know that I have sharp words” (quoted in Ballin 2015, 3). The self-appraisal is not unlike Oodgeroo's view of her poetic purpose: “I’d rather hit them with my words than pick up a gun and shoot them” (quoted in Fox 2011, 62). In his introduction to Sanchez's Home Coming, Don L. Lee (1969, 7–8) argues that “Sonia wants us to/live & to/live is not synonymous with to/exist.