RACHEL M. HARPER is the author of three novels: The Other Mother, WINNER of the Stonewall Book Award and Finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award; This Side of Providence, shortlisted for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence; and Brass Ankle Blues, a Borders’ Original Voices Award finalist and Target Breakout Book.

Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous anthologies including Women Talk MoneyBlack Cool, Literary Pasadena, and Mending the World: Stories of Family by Contemporary Black Writers, as well as the journals Carolina Quarterly, Chicago Review, African American Review, and Prairie Schooner.

Her One-Act play, “Bluffing on a Queen’s Playground,” was part of the New Black Playwrights Festival at Actor’s Express in Atlanta, and she collaborated on the performance piece, “The Book of Daniel,” by award-winning interdisciplinary theatre artist Daniel Alexander Jones. She has also written several scripts, including an adaptation of award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson’s novel Hush, co-written with Sam Zalutsky, and the original pilots City of Providence and Los Anchorage.

Harper has received multiple fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell, and was profiled by The Root as part of their city series on Los Angeles’ Black literary giants. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Southern California, Harper is on the faculty at Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is currently at work on several new projects.