Sapphire

Author profile

born

August 04, 1950 in Fort Ord, California, The United States

gender

female

About this author

Ramona Lofton was born in Fort Ord, California, one of four children of an Army couple who relocated within the United States and abroad. After a disagreement concerning where the family would settle, her parents separated, with Lofton's mother "kind of abandoning them". Lofton dropped out of high school, fleeing her abusive father, and moved to San Francisco, where she attained a GED and enrolled at the City College of San Francisco before dropping out to become a "hippie". In the mid 1970s Lofton attended the City College of New York and obtained a MFA degree at Brooklyn College. Lofton held various professions before starting her writing career, working as a performance artist as well as a teacher of reading and writing.
Career

Lofton move...more Ramona Lofton was born in Fort Ord, California, one of four children of an Army couple who relocated within the United States and abroad. After a disagreement concerning where the family would settle, her parents separated, with Lofton's mother "kind of abandoning them". Lofton dropped out of high school, fleeing her abusive father, and moved to San Francisco, where she attained a GED and enrolled at the City College of San Francisco before dropping out to become a "hippie". In the mid 1970s Lofton attended the City College of New York and obtained a MFA degree at Brooklyn College. Lofton held various professions before starting her writing career, working as a performance artist as well as a teacher of reading and writing.
Career

Lofton moved to New York City in 1977 and immersed herself in poetry. She also became a member of a gay organization named United Lesbians of Color for Change Inc. She wrote, performed and eventually published her poetry during the height of the Slam Poetry movement in New York. Lofton took the name "Sapphire" because of its one-time cultural association with the image of a "belligerent black woman," and also because she said she could more easily picture that name on a book cover than her birth name.
Sapphire self-published the collection of poems Meditations on the Rainbow in 1987. As Cheryl Clarke notes, Sapphire's 1994 book of poems, American Dreams is often erroneously referred to as her first book. One critic referred to it as "one of the strongest debut collections of the 1990s".
Her first novel, Push, was unpublished before being discovered by literary agent Charlotte Sheedy, whose interest created demand and eventually led to a bidding war. 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. The book was published in 1996 by Vintage Publishing and has since sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Sapphire noted in an interview with William Powers that "she noticed Push for sale in one of the Penn Station bookstores, and that moment it struck her she was no longer a creature of the tiny world of art magazines and homeless-shelters from which she came". The novel brought Sapphire praise and much controversy for its graphic account of a young woman growing up in a cycle of incest and abuse.
A film based on her novel premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2009. It was renamed Precious to avoid confusion with the 2009 action film Push. The cast included Gabourey Sidibe, Mo'Nique, who won the Academy Award for her portrayal of Precious' mother Mary, Mariah Carey, and Lenny Kravitz. Sapphire herself appears briefly in the film as a daycare worker.
Sapphire's writing was the subject of an academic symposium at Arizona State University in 2007. In 2009 she was the recipient of a Fellow Award in Literature from United States Artists.
Sapphire currently lives and works in New York City.

She has recently released a companion novel to "Push" that focuses on Precious's son, titled "The Kid".
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Books by Sapphire

Average rating: 3.73 · 21,219 ratings · 4,383 reviews · 14 distinct works

	Push 3.77 avg rating — 20,174 ratings — published 1996 — 30 editions	My rating:
	The Kid 2.46 avg rating — 745 ratings — expected publication 2012 — 6 editions	My rating:
	American Dreams 4.02 avg rating — 137 ratings — published 1994 — 2 editions	My rating:
	Black Wings and Blind Angels 3.99 avg rating — 71 ratings — published 1999 — 3 editions	My rating:
	Astral Sex: 4.00 avg rating — 4 ratings	My rating:
	The Kid [With Earbuds] 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 2011	My rating:
	Drift 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 1996	My rating:
	Sapphire's Astral Projection Adventures Throughout The Universe (Volume I) 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 2006 — 2 editions	My rating:
	The Secrets Of Death: In The View Of Astral Projection 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	My rating:
	Mastering Remote Viewing: 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 2006	My rating:

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Interviews

July 2011, Sapphire
"Fifteen years after her novel Push introduced pregnant, illiterate teen Precious Jones, Sapphire returns with The Kid, a searing coming-of-age novel about Precious's son." ...More

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Quotes by Sapphire

“Mother to Son

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor -
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a'climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now -
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
- Langston Hughes (112)”
― Sapphire, Push

32 people liked it

“… but you cant get all hung up on details when you are trying to survive…”
― Sapphire

tags: push

19 people liked it

“I'm alive inside. A bird is my heart. Mama and Daddy is not win. I'm winning. I'm drinking hot chocolate in the Village wif girls--all kind who love me. How that is so I don't know. How Mama and Daddy kknow me sixteen years and hate me, how a stranger meet me and love me. Must be what they already had in they pocket. ”
― Sapphire

tags: push

15 people liked it

See all Sapphire's quotes »

Polls

Which book would you like to see as the selection for our Winter 2011 Group Reads category African American Literature?

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

37 votes 29.6%

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

30 votes 24.0%

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

17 votes 13.6%

Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill

10 votes 8.0%

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

7 votes 5.6%

Ain't No Sunshine by Leslie DuBois

7 votes 5.6%

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

6 votes 4.8%

The Kid by Sapphire

5 votes 4.0%

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

4 votes 3.2%

The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate

2 votes 1.6%

125 total votes

3 comments

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