Sapphire's Literary Breakthrough Erotic Literacies, Feminist Pedagogies, Environmental Justice Perspectives

This thoughtful collection explores the writing of provocative poet, author, and performance artist Sapphire. Like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and other important writers, Sapphire challenges narratives that limit human imagination and possibility. PUSH, and its award-winning film adaptation Precious,, have sparked national debate about the intentions and responsibilities of black literature and cinema. Sapphire's Literary Breakthrough enlists new and established scholarly voices to elucidate Sapphire's social justice concerns and to locate her contributions within larger African American literary traditions and cultural landscapes.

Elizabeth McNeil is Instructor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author of Trickster Discourse: Mediating Transformation for a New World and has published in MELUS, the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and Studies in American Humor. Neal A. Lester is Foundation Professor of English at Arizona State University and specializes in African American literature and cultural studies. The author or co-author of four books, Lester has written on such figures as ntozake shange, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Carolivia Herron; and on such topics as sexual violence and black masculinities, the racialized politics of desire in personal ads, and black homoeroticism. DoVeanna S. Fulton is Chair and Associate Professor of the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama. Her books, Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women's Narratives of Slavery and Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts: Three African American Women's Oral Slave Narratives (co-edited with Reginald Pitts), examine discursive practices in African American women's life narratives. Lynette D. Myles teaches in the Department of English and African and African American Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of Female Subjectivity in African American Women's Narratives of Enslavement: Beyond Borders.