Sapphire (born August 4, 1950, Fort Ord, California, U.S.) is an American author of fiction and poetry that features unsparing though often empowering depictions of the vicissitudes of African American and bisexual life.
Lofton, whose father was a U.S. Army sergeant and whose mother was a member of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), spent portions of her childhood in California, Texas, and West Germany. She briefly attended San Francisco City College in the 1970s, ultimately dropping out to immerse herself in the burgeoning countercultural movement. It was during this period that she changed her name to Sapphire, a reference both to the emerging New Age fascination with crystals and to the stereotype of a belligerent black woman derived from a character on The Amos ’n’ Andy Show (1928–60). In 1977 she moved to New York City, where she worked as an exotic dancer while honing her poetic skills at such venues as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Meditations on the Rainbow, her first book of poetry, was published in 1987.
The 1992 publication of her poem “Wild Thing” in a journal funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) propelled Sapphire, until then relegated to the New York poetry scene, to the centre of a national controversy over the NEA’s perceived endorsement of blasphemy. The furor that ensued after NEA chair John Frohnmayer defended the poem, which employed a compromising depiction of Jesus Christ in illustrating the hardships endured by the perpetrators of a widely discussed rape, led him to resign. Sapphire eventually returned to school, earning a bachelor’s degree in modern dance (1993) from the City College of New York. Her second book of poetry, American Dreams, was released in 1994. That same year she received the MacArthur Foundation Scholarship in Poetry, which supported her pursuit of a master’s degree in writing at Brooklyn College (1995). Sapphire released another collection of poetry, Black Wings and Blind Angels, in 1999.
Her 1996 novel Push, for which she was best known, tells the harrowing story of Claireece Jones, called Precious, an obese, illiterate African American teenager living in Harlem who, having been raped by her father, is both HIV-positive and the mother of two children. Styled as a journal that Precious begins when she transfers to an alternative school, the novel utilizes vernacular along with frequent malapropism and misspelling to evince the protagonist’s struggles with literacy. As Precious commits her story to paper under the patient tutelage of Ms. Rain, her teacher, she begins for the first time to imagine a life beyond her daunting circumstances. Though generally acclaimed, the novel met with objection from some African American critics who disputed its emphasis on the afflictions of the black community. The Kid (2011)—told from the perspective of Precious’s son following his mother’s death from AIDS complications—received an even more-polarized reception. The novel’s blistering scenes of violence and sexual abuse were characterized by some commentators as brave reflections of a hidden reality, while others saw them as needlessly provocative.
Push was filmed as Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire (2009).