Michael S. Harper

Michael Steven Harper was born on the eighteenth of March 1938 at Brooklyn, New York, the son of Walter Harper — a Brooklyn Black postal worker — and Katherine Johnson Harper. He was raised at the family relocation to the West-Adams Los Angeles community in 1951.

He completed his secondary education at the Susan Miller Dorsey High School at Los Angeles in 1955 — and attended Los Angeles City College and Los Angeles State College from 1955 to 1961. He completed the bachelor's degree at Los Angeles State College in 1961 and the master's degree at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1963.

He taught across the early 1960s and late 1960s at Pasadena City College and at California State College at Hayward — and was hired in 1970 by Brown University at Providence, Rhode Island as the founding director of the principal Brown University creative writing programme. He held the principal Brown University creative writing programme founding-director position from 1970 to 2009.

He published his first poetic volume Dear John, Dear Coltrane at the principal University of Pittsburgh Press at Pittsburgh in 1970 — the principal post-1967 Black-American jazz-and-history poetic volume of the principal post-Coltrane-death American jazz-and-poetic-canon. Dear John, Dear Coltrane was nominated for the principal 1971 National Book Award for poetry.

He published eleven further poetic volumes across the principal post-1970 University-of-Pittsburgh-and-University-of-Illinois-Press period — including History Is Your Own Heartbeat of 1971, Song: I Want a Witness of 1972, Debridement of 1973, Nightmare Begins Responsibility of 1975, Images of Kin of 1977, Healing Song for the Inner Ear of 1985, Honorable Amendments of 1995, and Selected Poems of 2002.

He was named the principal first poet laureate of Rhode Island in 1988 — and held the principal Rhode Island poet-laureate position from 1988 to 1993.

He was awarded the principal 1972 Black Academy of Arts and Letters Award for poetry, the principal 1977 Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the principal 1989 Robert Hayden Memorial Poetry Award (named for Robert Hayden, placed in this archive).

He was the principal mentor of three generations of Black-American poets at Brown University across his thirty-nine-year Brown-faculty tenure — including the principal students Mark Doty, Carolyn Forche, Charles Wright, Gary Snyder, and the principal post-1970 Brown University creative writing programme Black-American-poetic generation.

He co-edited with the principal Brown University literary scholar Robert Stepto the principal anthology Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship at the University of Illinois Press in 1979 — the principal foundational post-Black-Arts-Movement Black-American literary anthology of the principal post-1970 American academic literary-anthology canon.

He died at Providence, Rhode Island on the seventh of May 2016 of complications of a long illness, at seventy-eight.

He is honored here as the author of Dear John, Dear Coltrane.