Sapphire

August 9th

Idioma: inglés

Traducciones: griego (9 Αυγούστου 1945), alemán (9. August [1945]), italiano (9 agosto), esloveno (9. avgust)

August 9th

Hate, black teeth, half an
eyeball, torn light, green grass, dirt
wings. Sick, blind angel.

Sapphire

Foto © gezett.de

* 04.08.1950, Ford Ord, Kalifornie, Estados Unidos
Vive en: New York, Estados Unidos

Sapphire is born Ramona Lofton on August 4, 1950 in Ford Ord, California. She studies Modern Dance in New York and graduates cum laude from City College of New York. In 1994 she receives the McArthur Scholarship for Poetry and in 1995 she graduated from Brooklyn College´s M.F.A. program in poetry .

Sapphire´s literary beginning takes place in the famous Nuyorican Poets Café, the place where slam-poetry origined, the epicenter of the new voices of America. She becomes famous as a poet, as perfomance artist at poetry slams and as civil rights activist. Sapphire is the author of American Dreams, a poetry anthology, which Publisher´s Weekly called „one of the strongest debut collections of the 90s.“ One of the poems in American Dreams, Wild Thing, that made her famous, directs itself powerfully at sexual violence. Sapphire says about herself: „I ´m not trying to be a new Shakespeare or Henry James. I am trying to find the blackest, bloodiest and most female form of expression of all.“

Foto © gezett.de

When people talk about Sapphire´s texts these days, then mostly under the aspect of political engagement and social concerns. She lends a voice to those who, being abused, raped, murdered, racially persecuted, have no voice anymore.

For example to the silent pregnant minors of Harlem, whom – like in her novel Push (1996) -she literally gives a voice: the liberation from the not-knowing-how-to-read-and-write. To find the words and be able to tell in writing about their own world. Oral violence against real violence everywhere in the streets, in the families, in God´s own land.

Her novel Push receives the Book-of-the-Month-Club Stephen Crane-Award for Fiction as well as the Black Caucus-Award of the American Library Association´s First Novelist Awards in 1997 and receives the Mind Book of the Year- Award in England. The magazine The Village voice calls Push one of the 25 best books of the year 1996 and Time Out ranks the book among the ten best titles of the year 1996.

Sapphire says about the Black American Writing: „My mother´s family in America started with the marriage of an English indentured servant and an African Slave who met, according to my Mother, on a slave ship bound for America. I am part of the African American literary tradition that began in 1773 when Phillis Wheatley, a female African slave, published a book of poetry. It was the first book of imaginative literature written in English to be published by a black person in the United States of America.“

In 1999 she publishes her poetry anthology Blind Wings & Blind Angels which also arouses a lot of attention. Her works have been translated into eleven languages, her poems and literary writings appear in many newspapers and magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Bomb.

In March 2001, Sapphire participates in a translation workshop organized by the literaturWERKstatt berlin on the occasion of the World Day of Poetry: From March 17 to 21, 2001, six authors from Italy, America, France, Belgium, Greece and Germany were invited to work on the translations of their poems.

Sapphire lives in New York.

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