Sonia Sanchez is the recipient of The Academy of American Poets’ prestigious Wallace Stevens Award. The New York Times reports the poet, author, and activist received the $100,000 lifetime achievement prize Tuesday.

Sanchez has written 16 books. Her poetry collections include “Morning Haiku,” “Shake Loose My Skin,” “I’ve Been a Woman,” and “Homegirls and Handgrenades.” She’s previously been honored with the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry as well as the Langston Hughes Poetry Award. Sanchez is also the subject of Sabrina Schmidt Gordon’s 2015 doc “BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez.”

“The formal virtuosity Sonia Sanchez has honed across five decades of poetry collections is tenaciously rooted in the transforming social power of art. Her life and poems reflect a steadfast devotion to humanity, a love for womanhood, black culture, and education,” said Terrance Hayes, Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. “Her poems display a masterful fusion of political and spiritual urgencies. They spring from her like songs, prayers, and spells displaying uncompromising artfulness and consciousness. In some West African cultures the griot is protector of memory and culture, part oracle, part archivist. Sonia Sanchez is our peerless griot of American poetry,” he observes. “There is no poet like her in the whole motley canon. There may have never been a more appropriate recipient of an award honoring poetic mastery and originality.”

This is the fourth consecutive year the Wallace Stevens Award has gone to a woman. Joy Harjo took home the prize in 2015, Sharon Olds in 2016, and Jorie Graham last year. Adrienne Rich and Louise Glück are among its other recipients.