Sapphire
@MsSapph
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Author. Poet. #PushbySapphire #TheKidbySapphire #AmericanDreamsbySapphire #BlackWingsandBlindAngels #SapphireTheAuthor
New York, NY
Joined April 2020
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First woman in her family to go to college.
First woman in her family to publish a book.
Happy International Women’s Day🔥
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Exactly 35 years ago to the day an affirmative and sweet card from Audre Lorde. She is writing from Berlin where she sought treatment to prolong her life that she was unable to get in the United States.
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She was multi racial: her mother was Afro Indian and her daddy was a traveling Japanese salesman. She was bisexual, into Siamese cats, and she changed American poetry with her wild, bizarre, and beautiful monologues.
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Her mother was African American and Native American. Her father was a Japanese traveling salesman. Ai went on to create some of the most original and searing poetry America had ever heard.
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ALTA 1942-2024 started Shameless Hussy press with a printing press in her garage. She was Ntozake Shange’s first publisher, publishing “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enough” the 1970s.
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What rationalizing genocide sounds like
Anderson Cooper's guest tonight, former Israeli intelligence chief:
"The noncombatant population in the Gaza strip is really a nonexistent term because all of the Gazans voted for Hamas, and as we have seen on 7th of October most of the population in the Gaza strip are Hamas."
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TAKE IT FROM ME ON TUESDAYS: Great Books By and About Black Women. Barbara Christian got a PhD at 27 and attempted until she died at 56 to define an African American feminist philosophy of criticism. Much of the work is out of print waiting for a new generation to bring it back.
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Reissued this year! When I first read this book in 1985 all the writers were alive. Of the 14 featured Black women writers only 5 are still here. If you can look them up, go see them!
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Still in print sort of… contains the complete text of A STREET IN BRONZEVILLE, Pulitzer Prize winning ANNIE ALLEN, MAUD MARTHA, and THE BEAN EATERS.
A must have for serious students of Black women’s literature. Get it while it’s still available.
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Wanda Coleman broke the stranglehold of black middle class respectability to discuss homosexuality, interracial sex, prostitution, and colorism.
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Friends vaccinate at the funeral!
46 y.o. Brandon Haynes from
#Louisiana
died from COVID. "I asked him to take the vaccine & he wouldn't. The best way I can honor him is to request friends and family members take the vaccine.” Mom provided a vaccine clinic at his funeral
#SoulsLostToCovid
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One of the few recent anthologies to include the work of Angelina Grimke, a Black lesbian who slipped like so many into silence and obscurity. SHE SHINES in this new anthology with a foreword by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Tracy K. Smith.
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Walter Mosley: “This June Jordan treasure is a rare piece of fiction from one of America’s most vital poets and essayists.”
She’s a miracle! I was honored to write the introduction for the 2010 reissue of HIS OWN WHERE.
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Precious: “Nurse at clinic say to me, You are HIV positive.” In 1996 PUSH depicts a lovable and loving African American girl child with HIV in mainstream literature. Have a productive WORLD AIDS DAY!
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In the 1960s & 1970s in the absence of mainstream publishers many Black voices would never have been heard if not for small independent African American publishers. How do we keep the work alive now that the publishers and poets themselves are passing on?
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TAKE IT FROM ME ON TUESDAYS: Great Books By And About Black Women.
In print since 1984 and still available. Contains rousing interviews with Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton, Margaret Walker, Audre Lorde, Carolyn Rodgers and other luminaries.
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Shining at 75!
“It’s not an exaggeration to say she’s the defining artist of Baltimore,” Lowery Stokes Sims curator.
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A friend spotted one of my babies (now 25 years old!) in California yesterday and sent this photo
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If this is hell, and it does seem that way, not all, but a lot of the time, the way out, our salvation, is each other, action, and organizing.
So much love to you!
14 children killed. As usual the American government will send thoughts and prayers and little else. I am not a religious person but every day I move closer to the belief that hell is right here on earth and America is the furnace.
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TAKE IT FROM ME ON TUESDAYS: Great Books by and About Black Women: Unapologetically Black, unapologetically Butch. “Instead of vigils, Parker vowed vengeance. Instead of elegies, Parker vowed action.” Julie Marie Wade
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Hungry for a story of a beautiful bisexual woman? Look no further! Thank you Dr. Green for this lovely biography of Alice Dunbar-Nelson
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Happy Birthday NTOZAKE SHANGE the Black woman who revolutionized American theater
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A great book for JUNETEENTH. This is the one that cast a light on medical abuse and torture of African Americans. A well researched page turner by Harriet A. Washington.
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The times are eerily reminiscent of Reconstruction when our great economic, artistic, and political strides as Blacks were were met with burning searing VIOLENCE meant to stifle and crush any forward movement
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Octavia Butler: “Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know if better times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”
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One of the many things this book did was shine a light on how homophobia blighted the Black poet Angelina “Nana” Weld Grimke’s life.
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So honored to be being read by a whole new generation🙌🏿♥️🙌🏿
“These books you are banning are important to us. They can motivate and teach us many things. These books show us that we are NOT alone.” -Mia. She came in to my class BEAMING today with her own copy of
@MsSapph
’s PUSH today.
#pushback
#enoughisenoughcysd
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“The proceeds from the sale of Black slave children were used to build WHITE schools.”
Let that sink in.
In Louisiana, black women were put in cells with male prisoners and some became pregnant.
All children born in the penitentiary to blacks were property of the state.
At 10 years, they would be auctioned off. The proceeds were used to fund schools for white children.
-THREAD-
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@MrsBoomBoomNYC
Excellent analysis! Young people are getting it right where their elders have missed the mark.
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When I was writing my second novel about a boy with mental illness, I returned again and again to the work of BESSIE HEAD.
“Her ability to give mind-suffering a kind of picture language, brilliantly conveys a positively medieval horror…” The Sunday Times [London]
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What’s happening? Black women are penning some of the most thought provoking scholarship in the land.
Here is truth intimate and terrifying in its depth and beauty,
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TAKE IT FROM ME ON TUESDAYS: Great Books by and About Black Women: How it started: A single mother penning a novel at her kitchen table after work. Where it ended: She became ONE OF AMERICA’S GREATEST WRITERS:
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
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The Women of Brewster Place was an amazing book.
Vintage Black Genius:
The Women of Brewster Place.
(Back when the made-for-tv movies were exceptional.)
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KARINTHA
Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon/ O can’t you see it, O can’t you see it…
Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child, carrying beauty perfect as dusk…
from CANE by Jean Toomer
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Vital. And this formation of a new HBCU medical school is an inspiration in the face of the death blow to affirmative action.
HBCUs continue to do the heavy lifting of educating this country’s future Black physicians and health professionals. Xavier University of Louisiana and Ochsner Health have agreed to form the fifth HBCU medical school in the country.
THREAD.
Link:
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In 1994 I couldn’t get one “Black” person to blurb my book except KING Essex Hemphill. But he was more than enough!
A happy celestial birthday to Ancestor Essex Hemphill, who taught us: “I love myself enough to be who I am.” Thank you, Ancestor Essex. We love you forever. 💜🙏🏿Collage: Alexis Pauline Gumbs
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I remember the events of 20 years ago described here clearly. Please listen to Professor Pierre’s analysis of that time to understand Haiti TODAY.🇭🇹
Fighting continues to rage in Haiti between security forces and paramilitary forces calling for the resignation of unelected Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
Haitian American scholar Jemima Pierre explains what she calls Haiti's "crisis of imperialism.”
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Celebrating the 25th anniversary with a forward by
@TayariJones
and an afterword by me
@MsSapph
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Harriet Jacobs wrote one of the most significant and game-changing slave narratives. There was no white amanuensis writing for her. SHE WROTE HER BOOK HERSELF! It was a first!
Happy 4th of July!
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Literacy is power!
Mary Bowser a free Black woman that took a job as a servant in the Confederate White House. She pretended to be illiterate. For years, everything she saw and read was fed to the Northern Union to free her people of slavery.
#FreshVoicesRise
#ONE2DAY
#BlackHistoryWithLana
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Which lives mattered, which got memorialized, which were forgotten?
"I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake." —Leopold II of Belgium
Before Hitler killed 6 million Jews.…. Leopold Il of Belgium killed over 10 million Africans in Congo and amputated the arms of countless others.
A THREAD
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Today would have been my mother’s 102nd birthday. That pretty little one she’s holding is me. Happy Birthday Mommy!
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“I found god in myself & I loved her/I loved her fiercely” Ntozake Shange
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via
@NYTOpinion
“The attacks on transgender people and LGBTQ rights are part of the attack on abortion and reproductive rights. It is an attack on the BODILY AUTONOMY OF ALL AMERICANS.” Jamelle Bouie (this great analysis is NOT behind paywall)
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73 African American woman writer/working waiting for dreams denied to reply/September 14 2023
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I remember the day we decided on Gabby after weeks of auditioning girls from all over the country to play the part of Precious. I remember thinking, Yeah, she’s the one! I was adamant that a pretty girl get the part. Not only was she pretty, she was beautiful.
Part of me understands the backlash against that white woman calling Lizzo "Precious". But there is a huge part of me (all of me) that is even a bit more concerned about Gabourey Sidibe having to see the entire internet confirm that being compared to her is an insult.
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I think of the gentleness the MURDERER, the premeditated MURDERER, was treated with by the police and I think ultimately he was one of them. They wanted him to survive.
All night I couldn’t sleep thinking about the dead. Ultimately it could have been me.
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Mask on public transport would allow people like myself to travel again 😷
The CDC Director is finally saying to wear a mask again because of increased rates of respiratory pathogens… seems like mask requirements should be the standard of care in hospitals settings where most people with infectious diseases will go. What do you think,
@CDCDirector
?
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From being owned like property to owning land! She was remarkable in so many ways.
Harriet Tubman died 110 years ago today in Auburn, NY (on a piece of land she owned.) Here’s a photo of her funeral some days later.
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Without a doubt one of the best and definitely most definitive poetry books of the late twentieth century. No awards, no props etc but it cracked open a WORLD!
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Was able to order direct from USPS online
Stopped by the
@USPS
office in L'Enfant Plaza to try and procure a book of the new
#ToniMorrison
stamps. The clerk Informed me that they keep selling out and to check back next week.
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Blooming HERE NOW despite everything determined to write and to survive.
Good morning
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Any of us writing today are inheritors of her genius. Happy Birthday Ntozake Shange🎊🙌🏿🎉
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via
@NYTimes
EXCELLENT review by Kaitlyn Greenidge of Linda Villarosa’s new book UNDER THE SKIN: The Hidden Toll of Racism.
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It’s never just been the “pre-existing conditions” of low income and Black people that increased their COVID mortality, it was also how they were treated and mistreated in hospitals!
Major new
@nytimes
investigation: For years, NYU Langone’s Manhattan emergency room has been secretly giving priority access to donors, trustees and other VIPs, while providing only cursory care to the homeless.
@sarahkliff
@jbsgreenberg
@virginiahughes
🧵
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Women winning!
Sierra Leone’s Parliament passed a law prohibiting child marriages. This is a cause for celebration.
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“What to the slave is the Fourth of July” Frederick Douglass 1852.
David Blight deserves every award he got for this one! It’s a great biography.
How can you understand American without knowing Frederick Douglass?
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Not acceptable
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Brazilian anthology featuring seven of my poems. Very glad in a time of isolation to be in community in this way.
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This could happen to any of us though we often pretend it can only happen to some “other”.
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This is Sylvia a friend since 1965 liking a wonderful young poet! Sylvia did not survive COVID-19. Happy Easter to her memory and other essential workers like her who lost their lives caring for others.♥️😷🔥🙌🏿🎊🌷✍🏿
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Yes, this is a book for the times we are living through today!
I loved every chapter, every word, and every footnote of
@KeishaBlain
's UNTIL I AM FREE, a master class in learning lessons from history told through the prism of the life of the inimitable
#FannieLouHamer
. 🙏
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Seeing this film was a life changing experience for me!
MY NAME IS PAULI MURRAY opens in U.S. theatres tomorrow. This documentary honors Murray’s efforts to be heard and tells the story of Murray’s contributions to the struggle for human rights. See why Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and others have relied on Murray’s work.
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I love this BEST of New York City picture. I see this and think this is who we are!🔥
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Robin Kelly says, “This may be the most important US history book you will read in your lifetime.”
I’ll add this award winning book by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is also a page turner!
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Ntozake Shange who led the way in so many ways!💃🏿
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What a vibrant presence. I will never forget how she opened her heart and house to me!
Sad to tell Helen Kay fans out there that my mum died the day before yesterday. It is too soon to put her into the past tense. She has such a presence -we are keeping her in the present tense!
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A full three years after first reading PUNCH ME UP TO THE GODS I still think it’s some of the best writing on the planet
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Marie Ponsot won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry at 77. She published her last book COLLECTED POEMS when she was 95 years old. She used her life! She was a practicing Catholic and the mother of 7 children.
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All these people except one or two were in their 20s or 30s. We lost so much that night. Time to rethink the 2nd Amendment, it's not untouchable.
Today we remember the 49 beautiful souls that were taken too soon by gun violence 5 years ago today at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando.
#Pulse5YearsLater
#GunControlNow
💔💛💚💙💜
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Andrew Sullivan declared in the early hysteria of the AIDS epidemic that if there was to be a triage concerning antiviral drugs they should go first to gay white men not to poor blacks who were so stupid they didn’t know what had hit them!
This lucid
@dalepeck
step by step takedown of Andrew Sullivan reads like something he’s been preparing for years:
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Central York students wear red in silent protest of book ban, rating system
Young scholars protest banning of dozens of books including PUSH
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Getting ready to mask up and go get my bivalent COVID booster. Grateful for the privilege when so many in Africa and India have not had even one shot.
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Rainy early morning in NYC. My town! My city! My home! I had two suitcases and forty dollars in 1976 when I came here. I never looked back.
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I wrote about this case in my 1994 book AMERICAN DREAMS.
The poem was titled “Strange Juice (or the Murder of Latasha Harlins)”pp150
A friendly reminder 15 year old girl, murdered by Asian woman in the store. Falsely accusing her of stealing orange juice shot her in the back of the head was giving probation by a white supremacist female judge.
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Beautifully eloquent in this horrible horrible time🇵🇸
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I bought this painting by LaRonz Murray a few years back outside PENN Station for $75.00 He says he is influenced by Jean Michel Basquiat and Michael Stewart.
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“I believe that we will win!”
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