American writer Ramona Lofton, better known by her pen-name Sapphire, was BOTD in 1950. Born Romona Lofton in Ford Ord, California to a military family, she had a nomadic childhood, eventually moving to San Francisco in her teens. She studied briefly at the City College of Francisco before dropping out to become a hippie and began writing and performing poetry. She moved to New York in 1977, supporting herself as an exotic dancer in nightclubs. She became a star of the emerging Slam Poetry movement, and was a prominent member of the protest group United Lesbians of Color for Change. She self-published her first poetry collection Meditations on the Rainbow in 1987. The 1992 publication of her poem Wild Thing in a journal funded by the National Endowment for the Arts propelled her to the centre of a conservative-fuelled debate about the NEA’s endorsement of blasphemy. The NEA’s chairman John Frohnmayer offered a public defence of Sapphire’s work, leading to his resignation. Sapphire completed a degree in modern dance at City College of New York, while working on her second poetry collectionAmerican Dreams, published in 1994 by the independent publishing houses High Risk Books and Serpent’s Tail. Later that year, she received the MacArthur Foundation Scholarship in Poetry, allowing her to complete post-graduate study at Brooklyn College. She rose to popular attention with her 1996 novel Push, a harrowing semi-autobiographical story of an obese and illiterate Black teenager named Precious, who overcomes a life of poverty and physical and sexual abuse. The novel became an immediate bestseller, praised for its unflinching depiction of urban poverty and its stream-of-consciousness narrative, though was accused by some critics of being “poverty porn” and stereotyping urban African-American experience. The novel was successfully filmed in 2009 by Lee Daniels, winning an Oscar for Mo’Nique‘s supporting performance as an abusive mother and Geoffrey Fletcher’s adapted screenplay, and featuring Sapphire in a cameo role. Her other work includes the 1999 poetry collection Black Wings and Blind Angels, and the 2011 novel The Kid, focusing on the experiences of Precious’ son Abdul. Openly bisexual since forever, she lives in New York with her wide Cherry Seaborn.