Sapphire

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Ramona Lofton (born August 4, 1950), better known by her pen name Sapphire, is an American author and performance poet.

Early life

Ramona Lofton was born in Fort Ord, California, one of four children of an Army couple who relocated within the United States and abroad. After a disagreement concerning where the family would settle, her parents separated, with Lofton's mother "kind of abandoning them". Lofton dropped out of high school and moved to San Francisco, where she attained a GED and enrolled at the City College of San Francisco before dropping out to become a "hippie". In the mid-1970s Lofton attended the City College of New York and obtained an MFA degree at Brooklyn College. Lofton held various jobs before starting her writing career, working as a performance artist as well as a teacher of reading and writing.

Personal life

Sapphire lives in New York City. She is openly bisexual.

Like her character Precious, Sapphire was sexually abused at the age of eight by her father.

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Career

Lofton moved to New York City in 1977 and became heavily involved with poetry. She also became a member of United Lesbians of Color for Change Inc., a gay group that later published her poetry during the Slam Poetry festival in New York. Lofton adopted the word "sapphire" because of its one-time cultural association with the image of a "belligerent black woman" and also because she said she could more accurately picture the word on a book cover than her birth name.

Meditations on the Rainbow was released by Sapphire in 1987. As Cheryl Clarke notes, Sapphire's 1994 book of poems, American Dreams is often referred to as her first book. One commentator characterized it as "one of the best debut collections of the 1990s."

Push, her first book, was unpublished before being discovered by literary agent Charlotte Sheedy, whose curiosity sparked demand and culminated in a bidding war. In 1995, Sapphire sold the first 100 pages of Push to a publisher auction, but the highest bidder agreed to finish the book for $500,000. Vintage Publishing first published the book in 1996 and has since sold hundreds of thousands of copies. "She noticed Push for sale in one of the Penn Station bookstores, and at that moment she realized she was no longer a creature of the tiny world of art books and homeless shelters from which she came," Sapphire explained in an interview with William Powers. Sapphire received acclaim and skepticism for its graphic portrayal of a young woman living in a cycle of incest and abuse.

In January 2009, a film based on her novel premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It was renamed Precious in order to avoid confusion with the 2009 action film Push. Gabourey Sidibe, Mo'Nique, who received the Academy Award for her portrayal of Precious' mother Mary, Mariah Carey, and Lenny Kravitz were among the cast members. Sapphire herself appears in the film for a brief period as a daycare worker.

In 2011, she released The Kid, a sequel to Push about Sapphire's son Abdul. Sapphire said that part of the reason she decided to continue the story was due to the encouragement and admiration Push received in academic discussions.

Sapphire's writing at Arizona State University in 2007 was the subject of an academic symposium. In 2009, she was the recipient of a National Artists Fellowship in Literature.

In her words:

Sapphire's work is included in Margaret Busby's edited book New Daughters of Africa, a new anthology in Africa.

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