Alta Mae Harris Stevens was born in 1928 in Lima, Peru, along with her father’s first commercial airline, the world’s first regularly scheduled airline south of the equator. A graduate of Bryn Mawr...view moreAlta Mae Harris Stevens was born in 1928 in Lima, Peru, along with her father’s first commercial airline, the world’s first regularly scheduled airline south of the equator. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College with an M.A. in English from Dalhousie University and a B.Ed. from Mt. St. Vincent University, she was for a decade a high school teacher in Halifax County, Nova Scotia. While there, she represented the province in a national creation of feminist curricula at the high school level sponsored by the Canada Studies Foundation. She earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brown University when she was 70.
Publications include The Fountain Image in English Poetry from 1550 to 1667, her Dalhousie M.A. thesis (1971); a review of women’s roles in early Manitoba, co-authored with Linda McDowell(1975); Hallelujah and Amen! Immigrant Haitian Mothers, their Teenage Children, and a Protestant Fundamentalist Church, M.A. thesis (1990); “Manje in Haitian Culture”, Journal of Caribbean Studies, (Spring 1996); and Haitian Women’s Food Networks, United States of America (1998), her Brown dissertation. She has four children and five grandchildren. She lives with her brother, Harold R. Harris Jr., on Cape Cod.view less