Rachel M. Harper was born in Boston and raised in Providence, RI and rural Minnesota. A graduate of Brown University, she went on to earn her Master's degree from USC. Her poems and short fiction have been published in The Carolina Review, Chicago Review, African American Review, Prairie Schooner, and the anthology Mending the World: Stories of Family by Contemporary Black Writers. Harper's first novel, Brass Ankle Blues, was a Borders Original Voices Award finalist and selected as a Target Breakout Book She 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. Harper currently teaches fiction at Spalding University's brief-residency MFA in Writing Program.