Michael S. Harper won the Poetry Society of America's 1978 Melville Cane Award for Images of Kin.Dear John, Dear Coltrane and  Images of Kin were nominees for the National Book Award; History Is Your Own Heartbeat won the Black Academy of Arts and Letters award for poetry. He has been cited by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His other books include Nightmare Begins Responsibility, Chant of Saints, ed. (with Robert B. Stepto), and most recently Healing Song for the Inner Ear. He is an Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University, where he has taught since 1970.