The Kid by Sapphire

The Kid by Sapphire

The Kid brings us deep into the interior life of Abdul Jones, son of Sapphire's unforgettable heroine, Precious. Left alone by his mother's death to navigate in a world where love and hate sometimes hideously masquerade, forced to confront unspeakable violence, his history, and the dark corners of his own heart, Abdul claws his way toward adulthood. In a generational story that moves with the speed of thought from a Mississippi dirt farm to Harlem in its heyday, from a troubled Catholic orphanage to downtown artists' lofts, The Kid is a soaring tale of body and spirit, rooted in the hungers of flesh and of the soul.

Sapphire is the author of American Dreams, a collection of poetry that was named one of the best debut collections of the 1990s by Publishers Weekly. Her novel, Push, won the Stephen Crane Prize for First Fiction from the Book-of-the-Month Club, the First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and the Mind Book of the Year Award in the United Kingdom. The Village Voice and Time Out New York chose Push as one of the best ten books of 1996. In the category of Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction, Push was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Putting her soul on the line in each stanza, Sapphire's latest collection, Black Wings & Blind Angels, preserves Sapphire's explosive power to win hearts and single minds, according to Poets and Writers Magazine.

The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Spin, and Bomb have all published Sapphire's work. PUSHing Boundaries, PUSHing Art: A Symposium on the Works of Sapphire was held at Arizona State University in February 2007. Sapphire's work has been adapted for theatre in the United States and Europe and has been translated into eleven languages. In the United States, Precious, the cinematic adaptation of her novel, just received the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Awards.

Sundance Film Festival (2009) held a dramatic competition.