Rachel M. Harper is a novelist and screenwriter based in Los Angeles. Her first novel, Brass Ankle Blues, was a Borders Original Voices Award finalist and selected as a Target Breakout Book. Her newest novel, This Side of Providence, which she began during her first MacDowell fellowship, will be published in April 2016.
Harper has recently collaborated with several MacDowell fellows; she adapted National Book Award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson’s novel Hush for television with filmmaker Sam Zalutsky, and is currently adapting award-winning author Rebecca Walker’s memoir Black, White & Jewish for television.
Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous anthologies including Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, Literary Pasadena, and Mending the World: Stories of Family by Contemporary Black Writers, as well as the journals Carolina Quarterly, Chicago Review, African American Review, and Prairie Schooner. 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 award-winning interdisciplinary theatre artist Daniel Alexander Jones.
Harper has received multiple fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell, and was profiled by The Root as part of their 2011 city series on Los Angeles’ black literary giants. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Southern California, Harper is on the faculty at Spalding University’s low-residency M.F.A. in Writing Program.
