Sapphire is first and foremost a poet and performer. She is the author of American Dreams. 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.