Sapphire

About Sapphire

Sapphire is the pen name of Ramona Lofton, born in 1950 at Fort Ord, California, who adopted the name because, as she has said, she could more easily picture it on a book cover. After moving to New York City in the late 1970s, she became involved in the city's slam poetry movement, performing her work and teaching reading and writing to teenagers in Harlem, an experience that would later shape her fiction directly. She published two poetry collections, Meditations on the Rainbow (1987) and American Dreams (1994), before turning to the novel that would define her career.

Push (1996) drew on her years teaching literacy and became a bestseller, praised for its unflinching first-person voice and its portrait of a teenager building a life out of circumstances designed to erase her. Its 2009 film adaptation, Precious, won acclaim at Sundance and an Academy Award for Mo'Nique's supporting performance, bringing Sapphire's novel to a far wider audience. She returned to Precious's story in 2011 with The Kid, following her son Abdul into adulthood, and has continued to publish poetry exploring trauma, survival, and voice.

Why Push Has Been Challenged

Objections to Push, which has drawn challenges in 8 states and 30 districts tracked in this catalog, center almost entirely on its graphic depiction of incest, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, narrated directly from inside its teenage protagonist's perspective rather than at a remove. Because the novel refuses to soften what Precious survives, challengers have argued the content is too explicit for school-age readers. Defenders counter that the book's honesty is inseparable from its purpose, and that softening Precious's testimony would undercut the very story it exists to tell.