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 was no longer a creature of the tiny world of art magazines and homeless-shelters from which she came". The book was published in 1996 by Vintage Publishing and has since sold hundreds of thousands of copies. 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. Her first novel, Push, was unpublished before being discovered by literary agent Charlotte Sheedy, whose interest created demand and eventually led to a bidding war. One critic referred to it as "one of the strongest debut collections of the 1990s". As Cheryl Clarke notes, Sapphire's 1994 book of poems, American Dreams is often erroneously referred to as her first book. Sapphire self-published the collection of poems Meditations on the Rainbow in 1987. Lofton took the name "Sapphire" because of its one-time cultural association with the image of a "belligerent black woman," and also because she said she could more easily picture that name on a book cover than her birth name. She wrote, performed and eventually published her poetry during the height of the Slam Poetry movement in New York. She also became a member of a gay organization named United Lesbians of Color for Change Inc. Lofton moved to New York City in 1977 and became heavily involved with poetry. Lofton held various jobs before starting her writing career, working as a performance artist as well as a teacher of reading and writing. In the mid-1970s Lofton attended the City College of New York and obtained an MFA degree at Brooklyn College. 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". After a disagreement concerning where the family would settle, her parents separated, with Lofton's mother "kind of abandoning them". Ramona Lofton was born in Fort Ord, California, one of four children of an Army couple who relocated within the United States and abroad.
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