Sapphire (author)
Sapphire , actually Ramona Lofton (born August 4, 1950 in Fort Ord , California ) is an American author and performance poet.
Life
Sapphire was born as one of four children to a military couple. She spent the first twelve years of her life on military bases in California and Texas before her parents separated and her mother "somehow left her." Sapphire lived as a teenager in South Philadelphia and San Francisco, among other places . After her hippie days, she moved to New York City in the 1970s and graduated from the City College of New York with a major in dance . Sapphire lived in Harlem from 1983 to 1993 and taught reading and writing to children and adults, among other things. She studied at Brooklyn College , where she received a writer scholarship and in 1994 won the MacArthur Foundation scholarship in poetry.
Sapphire self-published her first volume of poetry, Meditations on the Rainbow, in 1987, so it is wrong to call American Dreams from 1994 her literary debut. American Dreams gained notoriety when the Conservative Senator Jesse Helms read a few lines from the poem Wild Thing in the Senate and used them as an argument against the National Agency for the Support of the Arts (NEA).
Sapphire's first novel, Push , was published in 1996 with an edition of 150,000 and received several awards. In 2009 it was filmed under the name Precious to avoid confusion with the science fiction thriller Push .
Sapphire lives and works in New York City. She is an avowed lesbian .
plant
- 1987: Meditations on the Rainbow (poems)
- 1994: American Dreams (poems)
- 1996: Push (novel)
- 1999: Black Wings & Blind Angels (poems)
- 2011: The Kid (novel)
Awards (selection)
- 1996: Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction for Push
- 1996: Black Caucus of The American Library Association's First Novelist Award for Push
- 1996: The Mind Book of the Year Award for Push
- 2019: Inclusion in the New Daughters of Africa anthology by Margaret Busby
Individual evidence
- ↑ Cf. Across the Page: Bisexual Literature on afterellen.com ( memento of the original dated February 2, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b Owen Keehnen: Artist with a mission: A Conversation with Sapphire . In: Chicago Outlines', 8, 1996.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Sapphire |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Lofton, Ramona (real name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 4th August 1950 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Fort Ord , California |