Winner of Prize Americana, Ryan Harper’s poetry collection, MY BELOVED HAD A VINEYARD, travels through America to remind us who we are and where we come from. Filled with midnight and apple orchards and mountain valleys, his poems surprise and delight with magical ease.
“…Like Thoreau, like Frederick Law Olmsted, he thrives on the interface between human constructs and the natural world, as he discovers a poetry of sensory accuracy, cogent thinking, verbal intricacy, and rhythmic subtlety. I know of no one in his generation with greater intelligence and finer aesthetic resources. Temperamentally unsuited for lavishing superlatives on poetic debuts, still I can’t avoid feeling that Ryan Harper’s is magisterial and profound. Welcome him.” – Alfred Corn
Part of the American Made Music Series from University Press of Mississippi, Harper’s THE GAITHERS AND SOUTHERN GOSPEL examines issues of nostalgia, evangelism, race, and marketing in a gospel music franchise that has outperformed all Christian and much secular popular music on the American music market.
“Fandom, southern masculinity, nostalgia, and a text known as Gloria 3:16 (I won’t explain; you’ll have to open the book to discover what that means): these are just a few of the many perches on which Ryan Harper lands, and which he illumines, in The Gaithers and Southern Gospel. Harper is a wonderful writer and a winsome narrator.”– Lauren F. Winner, Duke Divinity School
Ryan P. Harper 