At the time of the 1994 conference, Michael S. Harper was serving as the first poet laureate of Rhode Island and had already published an impressive eight volumes of poetry, including the debut volume, Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1970), which was nominated for a National Book Award. Harper has served as editor of acclaimed works such as Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship (1979), Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945 (1994) and The Vintage Book of African American Poetry(2000). After the 1994 conference, Harper published books including Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems (2000), Debridement (2001), and Use Trouble(2003). Harper was a poet-in-residence at Lewis & Clark College, and worked at institutions such as Reed College, California State College, and Brown University, the latter of which he taught at for some 40 years. He has been honored by a National Institute for the Arts and Letters Award, a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Robert Hayden Memorial Poetry Award, among other distinctions. In 2005, Harper served as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and in 2008, he won a Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America. Michael S. Harper died in 2016.