Ryan P. Harper

Ryan Harper is an Assistant Professor of the Practice at Fairfield University’s Bellarmine campus in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He is the author of of The Gaithers and Southern Gospel: Homecoming in the Twenty First Century (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) and My Beloved Had a Vineyard, winner of the 2017 Prize Americana in poetry (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018). Ryan received his Ph.D. in Religion in the Americas from Princeton University. He is the creative arts co-editor of American Religion Journal.

Ryan’s individual poems and essays have received recognition from the W.B. Yeats Society, Ruminate, The Heartland Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Witness, Cutthroat, North American Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, Broad River Review, Alligator Juniper, Cincinnati Review, Peregrine, Mississippi Review, and the Orison Anthology.

A jazz drummer, distance runner, and former competitive weightlifter, Ryan is a native of Southeast Missouri. He lives with his spouse, Rev. Lynn Casteel Harper, in New York City.