Info on Sapphire - author of novel "Push".

Sapphire lives and works in New York City, and was born in Fort Ord, California. Her first collection of prose and poetry is American Dreams, published by Serpent's Tail/High Risk Books. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including High Risk 2: Writings on Sex, Death & Subversion; Critical Condition: Women on the Edge of Violence; and Women on Women: An Anthology of American Lesbian Short Fiction.

Sapphire graduated from City College in Harlem with a degree in Dance [and an M.F.A. from the writing program at Brooklyn College], where she was the 1994 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Scholarship in Poetry. She was the first place winner in Downtown Magazine's Year of the Poet III Award for 1994.

She moved to New York City in 1977 and immersed herself in poetry. She also became a member of a gay organization named United Lesbians of Color for Change Inc. She would meet with them on West 4th Street in NYC. She wrote, performed and eventually published her poetry during the height of the Slam Poetry movement in NYC.

She took the name Sapphire because of its association at one time in African-American culture with the image of a "belligerent black woman" and because she could picture the name on a book cover more than her birth name.

Sapphire self-published the collection of poems Meditations on the Rainbow in 1987. Her first novel, Push, was unpublished before being discovered by the renowned feminist literary agent Charlotte Sheedy, who created a buzz and demand for Sapphire's novel, eventually leading to a bidding war. Sapphire submitted the first 100 pages of Push to a publisher auction in 1995 and the highest bidder offered her $500,000 to finish the novel. The book was published in 1996 by Vintage Publishing and has since sold a large number of copies.

Sapphire noted in an interview with William Powers that “she noticed Push for sale in one of the Penn Station bookstores, and that moment it struck her she’s no longer a creature of the tiny world of art magazines and homeless-shelters from which she came”. The novel brought Sapphire praise and much controversy for its graphic account of a young woman growing up in a cycle of incest and abuse.

"Precious," the film based on her novel premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2009. Actors in it include Gabourey Sidibe, Mo'Nique, Mariah Carey, and Lenny Kravitz.

Here's an interview with the author with LA Weekly:

http://www.laweekly.com/2...interview/