[4] She stated that she wanted to live in New York "to find lesbians",[5] but, ended up in a brief heterosexual marriage and had a daughter, Jennifer Harris Wyland.

To support herself and her daughter, she worked as an editor and proofreader for a time, before returning to North Carolina to receive her M.F.A.

[7] She was later the director of Women's Studies and a Professor of Performing and Creative Arts at the College of Staten Island CUNY.

"[5] In all three of Harris' novels, she engages the aesthetics of late twentieth-century literature; they may be considered examples of literary postmodernism.

Her novels are stylistically akin to the work of modernist authors as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes (whom Harris greatly admired).

She once proclaimed that Djuna Barnes's work was "practically the only available expression of lesbian culture we have in the modern western world" since Sappho.