Dr. Harper has a PhD in the social sciences, with emphasis in intersectionality, anti-racism and racial-gender inclusion/equity. She holds a MA in Educational Technologies (emphasis in racial-gender inclusion/equity in technology) from Harvard University, where she received the Dean’s Award for her masters thesis work on how racial-gender privilege operates in cyberspace forums. She earned her BA in feminist geography from Dartmouth College and received the Innovative Thesis award for her work on heterosexism in rural geographies. She has 15+ years career experience as a diversity, equity, and inclusion expert, ranging from curriculum development, to conference planning, to research and reporting, to publishing books and articles, to workshop design and facilitation, to recruitment and retainment, to critical content editing, to strategic consulting. 

Dr. Harper created and edited the ground-breaking anthology, Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak On Food, Identity, Health, and Society. Her most recently published book, Scars: A Black Lesbian Experience in Rural White New England (Sense Publishers 2014) interrogates how systems of oppression and power impact the life of the only Black teenager living in an all white and working class rural New England town. 

In 2022, Dr. Harper’s latest second novel, Seeds of Sankofa, will be published. Listen to her Farm Sanctuary Inaugural address about her latest novel, racism in the food system, writing black food futures through Afro-futurism, and why we should be saying 'food apartheid' vs. 'food desert'.