EVENTS

Red Hen Press

Advisory Board Member

Michael Harper

Michael S. Harper was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1938. He earned a B.A. and M.A. from what is now known as California State University, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He has published more than ten books of poetry, including Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2000); Honorable Amendments (1995); Healing Song for the Inner Ear (1985); Images of Kin (1977), which won the Melville-Cane Award from the Poetry Society of America and was nominated for the National Book Award; Nightmare Begins Responsibility (1975); History is Your Heartbeat (1971), which won the Black Academy of Arts & Letters Award for poetry; and Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1970), which was nominated for the National Book Award. Harper edited the Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown (1980); he is co-editor with Anthony Walton of The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (2000) and Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945 (1994), and with Robert B. Stepto of Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship (1979). He was the first Poet Laureate of the State of Rhode Island (1988-1993) and has received many other honors, including a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Award and the Robert Hayden Poetry Award from the United Negro College Fund in 1990. He has been honored with honorary doctorates in Letters from Trinity College (Hartford, CT), Coe College (Cedar Rapids, LA), Notre Dame College (Manchester, NH), Kenyon College (Gambier, OH) and Rhode Island College (Providence, RI). In 1991 he was Visiting Scholar, at large, for Phi Beta Kappa, visiting nine campuses. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995 and Bowdoin College hosted the "Celebrating Harper" festival in 1996. Currently, Michael S. Harper is University Professor and Professor of English at Brown University, where he has taught since 1970. He lives in Barrington, Rhode Island.