Sapphire is the author of American Dreams, a collection of poetry which was cited by Publisher's Weekly as, 'one of the strongest debut collections of the nineties.' Her novel Push, 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. Push was named by TimeOut New York as one of the top ten books of 1996 and nominated for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction. About her last book of poetry, Poet's and Writer's Magazine wrote, 'with her soul on the line in each verse, her latest collection, Black Wings & Blind Angels, retains Sapphire's incendiary power to win hearts and singe minds.'
Sapphire's work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Spin, and Bomb. Sapphire's work has been translated in eleven languages and has been adapted for stage in the United States and Europe.