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My latest news: After presenting my eco-based art books (including rust- and ash-blackened papers, hand-stitched fabric scraps, botanical prints, and hand-lettered poetry and memoir) at the Lansing, MI, Nelson Gallery on 25 May 2024, I started working with digitized mixed-media collage. Here's one available at Wild Roof Journal.

Two more eco-collages from my "Memoir Maps" digitized collection.

 

Here's a link to hear me read from The Found Object Imagines a Life: New and Selected Poems during my 25 Sept 2022 "FUMFA Poets & Writers Live" session. (Reading at minute 39.)

Mary Minock, author of A Time When You Know a House: Poems of Detroit and The Way-Back Room: A Memoir of a Detroit Childhood says this about my 2022 collection, The Found Object Imagines a Life:
Crisp, carefully-shaped poems with nary an unnecessary word, nary an unmusical line, cover an ambitious range of themes: poems imagining the mythological figure Persephone, whom Harper locates in the Underworld of craggy Rocky Mountain caves. Poems exploring the relationship between humans and gods. Poems contemplating apocalypse and revelation. Poems exploring the love in a troubled relationship. Finally, poems of lived experience. Harper shows herself to be a consummate poet, faithful to the images that push her poems along, and comfortable in a range of poetic forms.

Dawn Burns, author of Evangelina Everyday says . . .
"No matter the subject at hand, Harper’s poems serve as revelation and reminder to love fiercely, embrace paradox, and tell stories. What a gift!"

And Laura Donnelly, author of Midwest Gothic . . .
This is a collection alive to the world and rich with what it finds there.

Mark B. Hamilton's November 2023 review of The Found Object Imagines a Life, at Cider Press Review.

And another link to a reading with three others at Everybody Reads, Lansing MI.

Click here for the Cornerstone Press book list and instructions for ordering.
Also available at Amazon or Barnes&Noble.

Who I am:

A 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award winner and OAC poet-in-residence at the Fine Arts Work Center of Cape Cod for the summer of 2019, I have made my home at the confluence of the Auglaize and Maumee rivers in Ohio, where I co-organize the yearly SwampFire Retreat (swampfire.org) for artists and writers.

A two-time winner of the 2018 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, my poetry has appeared in numerous journals. My Some Gods Don’t Need Saints chapbook was published in 2016, and The Found Object Imagines a Life was published by Cornerstone Press in September 2022.

Since retirement from teaching in 2019, I have been swimming in a whirlpool at the confluence of the visual and written arts, which takes me back to my original home in Kansas, where my mother taught me to stitch fabrics in creative ways and my father taught me to swim, to dance, to climb to the top of elm trees, where leaves meet the sky.

Some online publications:
Wild Roof Journal, 2020 poem
The Spectacle
Print-Oriented Bastards
Sheila-Na-Gig

Some Gods Don't Need Saints A finalist in the 2016 New Women's Voices Chapbook Contest.

Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature's 2018 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize