"Few literary works today are as affecting as [Sapphire's] or have had as much impact on our society." —Poets & Writers

“Precious tunnels inside your head, leaves you moved like no film in years and then lifts you up in ways you don’t see coming. Despite the pain at the story’s core, the movie has a spirit that soars.” —Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Famed in the worlds of literature, poetry, and literacy—and an extraordinary public speaker—Sapphire is first and foremost a poet and performer. She is the author of American Dreams, cited by Publisher's Weekly as, "One of the strongest debut collections of the nineties;" and Black Wings & Blind Angels, of which Poets & Writers declared, "With her soul on the line in each verse, her latest collection retains Sapphire's incendiary power to win hearts and singe minds." Library Journal calls Sapphire’s poetry “spiky and uncompromising” and describes her as a “poet of slick-talking, nearly hallucinatory riffs on growing up poor, tough, and black in America.”

Sapphire’s New York Times bestselling novel, Push, about an illiterate, brutalized Harlem teenager, was made into an Academy Award-winning major motion film, and won the Book-of-the-Month Club Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's First Novelist Award, and in Great Britain, the Mind Book of the Year Award. Push was named by The Village Voice as one of the top twenty-five books of 1996 and by TIMEOUT New York as one of the top ten books of 1996. Push was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction.

The Kid (Penguin, 2011) is Sapphire's second novel. The book tells the electrifying story of Abdul Jones, the son of PUSH's unforgettable heroine, Precious. Says editor Ann Godoff, "Sapphire never fails to render the hardest material comprehensible by coming from a place of love. In her second novel, she fearlessly explores the young life of an African American boy as he approaches manhood; alone, brutalized and with the soul of an artist."