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 MFA from the University of Southern California. Her poems and short fiction have been published in Chicago Review, African American Review, Prairie Schooner, and the anthology Mending the World: Stories of Family by Contemporary Black Writers. 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 recently collaborated on the performance piece, "The Book of Daniel," by interdisciplinary theatre artist Daniel Alexander Jones, which premiered in Austin, Texas in 2005. Harper 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 for an excerpt from her first novel, BRASS ANKLE BLUES. She lives in California.

Published Work

Fiction

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