Sapphire the Author. Sapphire is the author of Push, American Dreams, The Kid, and Black Wings & Blind Angels.
Push: A novel, won the Book-of-the-Month Club’s Stephen Crane award for First Fiction, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s First Novelist Award, and in Great Britain, the Mind Book of the Year Award. Named by the Village Voice and Time Out New York as one of the top ten books of 1996, Push was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction. Push was adapted into the Oscar winning film, Precious.
Sapphire’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Spin, and Bomb. In February of 2007 Arizona State University presented PUSHing Boundaries, PUSHing Art: A Symposium on the Works of Sapphire. Sapphire’s poetry has appeared in the following anthologies: Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing, and New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent. Sapphire’s work has been translated into over a dozen languages and has been adapted for stage in the United States and Europe.
