Biography

Rachel M. Harper was born in Boston, MA, and raised in Providence, RI and rural Minnesota. A graduate of Brown University, she went on to earn her Master's degree from the University of Southern California. Her poems and short fiction have been published in The Carolina Review, Chicago Review, African American Review, Prairie Schooner, and the anthology Mending the World: Stories of Family by Contemporary Black Writers.

Harper's first novel, Brass Ankle Blues, was published in 2006 by Simon & Schuster's Touchstone Division. She was chosen as one of Borders' "Best Original Voices" and the novel, which was recently published in paperback, was selected by Target's "Break Out Books" program.

She has received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and won the 2002 Fellowship in Fiction from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. 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 interdisciplinary theatre artist Daniel Alexander Jones, which premiered in Austin, Texas in 2005. She has been a teacher/educator for many years, working with children, teenagers, and college students in various settings. She has organized art programs at summer camps in Los Angeles and Providence, taught creative writing at several after-school programs in both cities, and been a guest lecturer in many college classrooms.

Harper currently teaches fiction at Spalding University's brief-residency MFA in Writing Program. She lives with her family in California, where she is at work on her second novel, This Side of Providence.

Published Work

Fiction

"Shades of Blue"
The Carolina Quarterly, Vol. 58, #3

BRASS ANKLE BLUES
Touchstone, New York. (Feb. 2006)

"Barefoot on the Ohio Turnpike"
Chicago Review, Vol. 44, #3/4

Poetry

"The Myth of Music"
published in Mending the World: Stories of Family by Contemporary Black Writers, edited by Rosemarie Robotham, BasicCivitas Books, New York. (2003)

"A Child Reads Invisible Man"
"American Collage"
"B.B. King: History of the Blues"
Prairie Schooner, Vol. 77, #3

"Bass"
"The Myth of Music"
African American Review, Vol. 33, #3