Michael (Steven) Harper

Poet and writer, born in New York City, New York, USA. He studied at City College (1954), California State, Los Angeles (1961 BA; 1962 MA), the University of Iowa (1963 MA), and the University of Illinois (1970–1). He taught at many institutions, notably at Brown University (1983), and lived in Providence, RI. He wrote poems linked to the sensibilities of African-Americans, as in Healing Song for the Inner Ear (1985).

1931) is a former Anglican priest in the Church of England, now ordained a priest in the Greek Orthodox Church.

Harper was a curate at All Souls Church, Langham Place (London), when he received what Pentecostals and charismatics refer to as the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, a religious experience accompanied by speaking in tongues. This put him at odds with the church's evangelical rector, John Stott, and Harper left All Souls in 1964 to found the Fountain Trust, an organization dedicated to spreading the charismatic message.

In his days as an Anglican charismatic leader, he wrote several books, including As at the Beginning (1965), a narrative of the growth of Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement in the twentieth century.

He left the Anglican Church in 1995 because of what he saw as the Church of England's increasing doctrinal laxity, particularly with regard to the ordination of women. He and his wife, Jeanne, joined the Orthodox Church, and Harper was ordained and made dean of the newly established Antiochian Orthodox Deanery of the United Kingdom and Ireland.