Michael S. Harper

Michael Steven Harper was born on the eighteenth of March 1938 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Walter Harper, a postal worker, and Katherine Johnson Harper, a medical secretary. When he was thirteen the family moved west to Los Angeles, settling in a largely white neighborhood where the young Harper first measured the distances a Black American life must cross. Asthmatic and bookish, he read widely and listened deeply, and it was jazz — above all the horn of John Coltrane — that would tune his ear for the rest of his days.

He studied at Los Angeles City College and what is now California State University, Los Angeles, then earned his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa's celebrated Writers' Workshop in 1963, where he was among the few Black students of his cohort. In 1970 he published his first collection, Dear John, Dear Coltrane, a book that wed the improvisational pulse of jazz to the weight of history and grief, and it was nominated for the National Book Award. That same year he joined the faculty of Brown University.

At Brown, Harper taught for forty-three years, becoming the first Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English and chairing its Master's program in creative writing, mentoring generations of poets before his retirement in 2013. His later volumes — History Is Your Own Heartbeat (1971), Images of Kin (1977), and Healing Song for the Inner Ear (1985) among them — deepened his meditation on kinship, race, and American memory. In 1988 he became the first Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, and in 2008 he received the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement.

Michael S. Harper died on the seventh of May 2016 in Providence, Rhode Island, at the age of seventy-eight. He remains honored as a poet who taught America to hear its own heartbeat.