Biography
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Born
18 March 1938
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Born In
Brooklyn, New York, New York, United States
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Died
7 May 2016 (aged 78)
Michael Steven Harper (March 18, 1938 – May 7, 2016) was an American poet from Brooklyn, who was the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island from 1988 to 1993. He published ten books of poetry, two of which - Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1970) and Images of Kin (1977) - have been nominated for the National Book Award. A great deal of his poetry is influenced by jazz and history. Many of his poems have been included as important examples of African-American literature and jazz poetry in various anthologies. Harper often writes about his wife, Shirley (commonly referred to as "Shirl"), their children, and their ancestors, as well as friends and various black historical and cultural figures.
Harper earned his B.A. and M.A. from California State University, Los Angeles, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa.
As of 2011, Harper lived in Barrington, Rhode Island. Until his retirement in December 2013, Harper was the longest serving professor of English and Literary Arts at Brown University, where he taught literature courses and poetry workshops to undergraduates.
In 1993, Nathan A. Scott in the "Afro-American Poetry" article of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics wrote, "Harper has created a body of work which, though it has won much respect and admiration, deserves to be far more widely known than it is."
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