Joelle Taylor: Push by Sapphire

Spoken word artist, slam poet, playwright, novelist and cultural terrorist Joelle Taylor chose the novel Push by Sapphire (the pen name of Romona Lofton).

Push tells the story of an illiterate teenage girl in living in Harlem who is pregnant by her own father for the second time. By entering an alternative teaching programme she learns to read and write, and starts to break free from her abusive parents.

Taylor says of the book: “The story of a young girl’s survival and struggle towards independence, freedom and the power of the word.”

Push was recently made into an Academy Award-winning film, Precious.