Sapphire submitted the first 100 pages of Push to a publisher auction in 1995 and the highest bidder offered her $500,000 to finish the novel. Her novel, Push, was unpublished before being discovered by the renowned feminist literary agent Charlotte Sheedy, whose interest created demand and eventually led to a bidding war. One critic referred to it as "one of the strongest debut collections of the '90s". As Cheryl Clarke notes, Sapphire's 1994 book of poems, American Dreams, is often erroneously referred to as her first book. Sapphire self-published the collection of poems Meditations on the Rainbow in 1987. She took the name Sapphire because of its association at one time in American culture with the image of a "belligerent black woman" and because she could picture the name on a book cover more than her birth name. She wrote, performed and eventually published her poetry during the height of the Slam Poetry movement in New York.
She also became a member of a gay organization named United Lesbians of Color for Change Inc. She moved to New York City in 1977 and immersed herself in poetry. Sapphire held various jobs before starting her writing career, working as a performance artist, a social worker, and a teacher of reading and writing. She attended City College of New York and obtained her master's degree at Brooklyn College. Sapphire dropped out of high school, moved to San Francisco where she enrolled in City College of San Francisco, only to drop out and become a “hippie”. After a disagreement over where the family would live, the family parted ways, with Sapphire’s mother "kind of abandon them". She was one of four children of an Army couple who moved all over the world. Sapphire was born Ramona Lofton in Fort Ord, California. Ramona Lofton, known professionally as Sapphire, is an American author and performance poet.
Awards-Fellow Award in Literature from United States.Education-B.A., City College of New York M.F.A., Brooklyn.An electrifying first novel that shocks by its language, its circumstances, and its brutal honesty, Push recounts a young black street-girl's horrendous and redemptive journey through a Harlem inferno.įor Precious Jones, 16 and pregnant with her father's child, miraculous hope appears and the world begins to open up for her when a courageous, determined teacher bullies, cajoles, and inspires her to learn to read, to define her own feelings and set them down in a diary.
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