Michael Steven Harper (born March 18, 1938) is an American poet from Brooklyn who has published ten books of poetry. He earned his B.A. and M.A. from what is now called California State University, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Two of his collections, "Dear John, Dear Coltrane", from 1970, and "Images of Kin", from 1977, have been nominated for the National Book Award. A great deal of his poetry is influenced by jazz and history. In fact, many of his poems have been included as important examples of African American literature and jazz poetry in various anthologies.

He was also the poet laureate for Rhode Island from 1988 to 1993. Harper currently lives in Barrington, Rhode Island. He is the longest serving professor of English at Brown University, where he continues to teach poetry workshops to undergraduates.

"Harper has created a body of work which, though it has won much respect and admiration, deserves to be far more widely known than it is," wrote Nathan A. Scott in the "Afro-American Poetry" article of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (in 1993). Harper often writes about his wife, Shirley (commonly referred to as "Shirl"), their children, their ancestors, as well as friends and various black historical and cultural figures.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Michael S. Harper", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0