Sapphire

Bestselling Novelist & Poet
Author of PUSH-the inspiration for the Academy Award-winning movie Precious

The Kid by Sapphire
Readings &
Lecture Topics
  • PUSHing Boundaries
  • When PUSH comes to Precious
  • PUSHing Boundaries in THE KID: Literature, Trauma & Healing
  • It Takes A Village: Recovering Our Children Through Literature & Literacy
  • The “Second” Novel
  • African American Women’s Literature & Me
  • African Americans in Literature & Literacy

Biography

“Few literary works today are as affecting as [Sapphire’s] or have had as much impact on our society.” —Poets & Writers

“Precious tunnels inside your head, leaves you moved like no film in years and then lifts you up in ways you don’t see coming. Despite the pain at the story’s core, the movie has a spirit that soars.” —Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Famed in the worlds of literature, literacy, and poetry—and an extraordinary public speaker—Sapphire is the author of two bestselling novels, Push and The Kid. The New York Times bestseller, Push—about an illiterate, brutalized Harlem teenager—won the Book-of-the-Month Club 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. Push was named by The Village Voice as one of the top twenty-five books of 1996 and by TimeOut New York as one of the top ten books of 1996. Push was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction. It was made into the Academy Award-winning major motion film, Precious, and the film adaptation received the Academy Award for Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress.

In her second novel, The Kid, Sapphire gives voice to Precious’s son, telling the electrifying story of Abdul Jones. Left alone by his mother’s death to navigate in a world where love and hate sometimes hideously masquerade, forced to confront unspeakable violence, his history, and the dark corners of his own heart, Abdul claws his way toward adulthood. In a generational story that moves with the speed of thought from a Mississippi dirt farm to Harlem in its heyday, from a troubled Catholic orphanage to downtown artists’ lofts, The Kid is a soaring tale of body and spirit, rooted in the hungers of flesh and of the soul. Says editor Ann Godoff, “Sapphire never fails to render the hardest material comprehensible by coming from a place of love. In her second novel, she fearlessly explores the young life of an African American boy as he approaches manhood: alone, brutalized and with the soul of an artist.”

Sapphire is also the author of two collections of poetry: American Dreams, cited by Publishers Weekly as, “One of the strongest debut collections of the nineties;” and Black Wings & Blind Angels, of which Poets & Writers declared, “With her soul on the line in each verse, her latest collection retains Sapphire’s incendiary power to win hearts and singe minds.” Library Journal calls Sapphire’s poetry “spiky and uncompromising” and describes her as a “poet of slick-talking, nearly hallucinatory riffs on growing up poor, tough, and black in America.”

Sapphire’s presentation, poetry, novels, and the film Precious, all speak to issues of overcoming adversity and empowerment.

Precious: Based on the novel Push by Sapphire, the film adaption of Sapphire’s novel won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay, and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress. It won the 2009 Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Awards in the U.S. dramatic competition at Sundance, and is the only film ever to win both the Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals Audience Awards. Precious is a vibrant, honest, and resoundingly hopeful film about the human capacity to grow and overcome. Called “the most painful, poetic and improbably beautiful film of the year” by The Washington Post, Precious follows the harrowing tale of an African American teenager, who, despite being abused, pregnant and illiterate, turns her world around. A. O. Scott of the New York Times writes, “[J]ust as Push achieves an eloquence that makes it far more than a fictional diary of extreme dysfunction, so too does Precious avoid the traps of well-meaning, preachy lower-depths realism. It howls and stammers, but it also sings.”

Sapphire’s work has been translated into thirteen languages and has been adapted for stage in the United States and Europe. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in The Black Scholar, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Teacher’s Voice, The New Yorker, Spin, and Bomb. She has performed her work at the legendary Nuyorican Poet’s Café, Franklin Furnace, the Bowery Poetry Club, Literaturwerkstadt in Berlin, and Apples & Snakes in London.

In 2007 Arizona State University presented PUSHing Boundaries, PUSHing Art: A Symposium on the Works of Sapphire. She has taught literature, fiction, and poetry workshops at SUNY Purchase, Trinity College, and the Writer’s Voice in New York City. She has taught graduate writing workshops in MFA programs at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Brooklyn College, and at the New School University. In 1990 she received an Outstanding Achievement in Teaching Award from Joyce Dinkins, then First Lady of New York City, for her work with literacy students in Harlem and the Bronx.

Short Bio

Sapphire is the author of two bestselling novels, Push and The Kid. Push was made into the Academy Award-winning major motion film Precious, and the film adaptation received the Academy Award for Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress. Sapphire’s work has been translated into thirteen languages and has been adapted for stage in the United States and Europe. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in The Black Scholar, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Teacher’s Voice, The New Yorker, Spin, and Bomb.

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