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PRESENTERS' BIOS | SPONSORS & DONORS | TANKA SUNDAY | BACK TO HNA HOME PAGE
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
of the HNA Board and the HNA 2017 Organizing Committee Members
& Conference Presenters
of the HNA Board and the HNA 2017 Organizing Committee Members
& Conference Presenters
Haiku North America Board
Garry Gay was born in 1951 in Glendale, California. He received his B.P.A. degree in photography in 1974 and has been a professional photographer since then. He has written haiku since 1975. He cofounded the Haiku Poets of Northern California in 1989 and was the group’s first president through 1990, and served 2001–2011 again as president. He founded HPNC’s Two Autumns reading series in 1990. He was elected as president of the Haiku Society of America in 1991, the same year that he founded the Haiku North America conference. In 1996 he also cofounded the American Haiku Archives. In 1992 he created the poetic form called rengay. He is the current HPNC president.
Deborah P Kolodji is the California Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America and moderates the Southern California Haiku Study Group. As former president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, she created the Dwarf Stars Anthology, which honors the best short speculative poetry, 1–10 lines long, from the previous year. Debbie has published over 900 haiku and 4 chapbooks of poetry. Her first full-length book of haiku and senryu, highway of sleeping towns, is available from Shabda Press. She has also published short stories in Thema and Tales of the Talisman, and a short memoir in Chicken Soup for the Dieter’s Soul. One of her haiku appeared in The Nebula Awards Showcase: 2015, published by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Debbie co-organized the 2013 HNA conference on board the Queen Mary in Long Beach, Calif., and joined HNA as a director in 2016.
Paul Miller incorporated Haiku North America as a tax-exempt organization in 2005 and serves as its CFO. He is the current Managing Editor of Modern Haiku, the longest running English-language haiku journal, established in 1969. Writing under the pseudonym ‘paul m.’ he is an internationally awarded and anthologized poet and essayist. He has published three collections of haiku, Finding the Way (2002), Called Home (2006), and Few Days North Days Few (2011). He is a two-time winner of the Haiku Society of America’s Kanterman Award and winner of the Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Award. He has a bachelor's degree in Cognitive Psychology and a master's degree in English.
Michael Dylan Welch cofounded Haiku North America in 1991, and has edited all HNA conference anthologies, published with his press, Press Here, including the 25th anniversary volume, Fire in the Treetops. In 1996 he cofounded the American Haiku Archives, and in 2000 he founded the Tanka Society of America, serving as its president for five years. He has been vice president of the Haiku Society of America, and in 2010 he founded National Haiku Writing Month (www.nahaiwrimo.com). His poems and essays have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies and his latest books include Seven Suns / Seven Moons and Becoming a Haiku Poet. His website is www.graceguts.com.
Deborah P Kolodji is the California Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America and moderates the Southern California Haiku Study Group. As former president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, she created the Dwarf Stars Anthology, which honors the best short speculative poetry, 1–10 lines long, from the previous year. Debbie has published over 900 haiku and 4 chapbooks of poetry. Her first full-length book of haiku and senryu, highway of sleeping towns, is available from Shabda Press. She has also published short stories in Thema and Tales of the Talisman, and a short memoir in Chicken Soup for the Dieter’s Soul. One of her haiku appeared in The Nebula Awards Showcase: 2015, published by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Debbie co-organized the 2013 HNA conference on board the Queen Mary in Long Beach, Calif., and joined HNA as a director in 2016.
Paul Miller incorporated Haiku North America as a tax-exempt organization in 2005 and serves as its CFO. He is the current Managing Editor of Modern Haiku, the longest running English-language haiku journal, established in 1969. Writing under the pseudonym ‘paul m.’ he is an internationally awarded and anthologized poet and essayist. He has published three collections of haiku, Finding the Way (2002), Called Home (2006), and Few Days North Days Few (2011). He is a two-time winner of the Haiku Society of America’s Kanterman Award and winner of the Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Award. He has a bachelor's degree in Cognitive Psychology and a master's degree in English.
Michael Dylan Welch cofounded Haiku North America in 1991, and has edited all HNA conference anthologies, published with his press, Press Here, including the 25th anniversary volume, Fire in the Treetops. In 1996 he cofounded the American Haiku Archives, and in 2000 he founded the Tanka Society of America, serving as its president for five years. He has been vice president of the Haiku Society of America, and in 2010 he founded National Haiku Writing Month (www.nahaiwrimo.com). His poems and essays have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies and his latest books include Seven Suns / Seven Moons and Becoming a Haiku Poet. His website is www.graceguts.com.
Haiku North America 2017 Organizing Committee
Sondra J. Byrnes is retired from teaching at the University of Notre Dame. In 2015 she and Charles Trumbull started a haiku study group in Santa Fe. She was elected Secretary for the Haiku Society of America for 2016.
Cynthia Henderson, a former middle school English teacher, is a retired businesswoman and entrepreneur. She is a member of the New Mexico State Poetry Society and has been with the Santa Fe haiku study group since its inception. She is currently serving on the HNA 2017 organizing committee, in charge of accounting and attendee registration.
Miriam Sagan founded and directs the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College. She is the author of over twenty-five books including the poetry collection Seven Places in America (Sherman Asher) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). She blogs at Miriam's Well (http://miriamswell.wordpress.com) which is also the small-press publisher of her two haiku books, All My Beautiful Failures and Dream That Is Not a Dream (with Elizabeth Searle Lamb). Sagan won has the Santa Fe Mayor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, a New Mexico Literary Appreciation Award, a New Mexico Book Award, and Best Memoir of the Year from Independent Publishers Association. She has been a writer in residence in many remote locations from the Petrified Forest to Iceland. She also installed the large metal haiku signs—a haiku by Chiyo-ni—on Santa Fe’s west side.
Charles Trumbull is retired from editing and publishing positions at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Encyclopædia Britannica. A past president of the Haiku Society of America and recipient of its Sora Award for service to the HSA, he was a co-organizer of Haiku North America 1999 and from 2006 to 2013 was editor of Modern Haiku. In 2013–14 he was Honorary Curator of the American Haiku Archives, and he served as secretary of the New Mexico State Poetry Society in 2013. Trumbull’s critical articles on the history of haiku have appeared widely in the journals and online. A haiku chapbook, Between the Chimes, was published in 2011 and A Five-Balloon Morning, his book of New Mexico haiku, in June 2013.
Scott Wiggerman’s Leaf and Beak: Sonnets is a finalist for the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry with the Texas Institute of Letters. He has two previous collections--Presence, and Vegetables and Other Relationships. Wiggerman has served as editor of several books, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga, and Bearing the Mask. Recent poems have appeared in Chrysanthemum, Red Earth Review, Frogpond, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Naugatuck River Review, and many other publications. He is a cofounder and editor for Dos Gatos Press. His website is http://swig.tripod.com.
Cynthia Henderson, a former middle school English teacher, is a retired businesswoman and entrepreneur. She is a member of the New Mexico State Poetry Society and has been with the Santa Fe haiku study group since its inception. She is currently serving on the HNA 2017 organizing committee, in charge of accounting and attendee registration.
Miriam Sagan founded and directs the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College. She is the author of over twenty-five books including the poetry collection Seven Places in America (Sherman Asher) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). She blogs at Miriam's Well (http://miriamswell.wordpress.com) which is also the small-press publisher of her two haiku books, All My Beautiful Failures and Dream That Is Not a Dream (with Elizabeth Searle Lamb). Sagan won has the Santa Fe Mayor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, a New Mexico Literary Appreciation Award, a New Mexico Book Award, and Best Memoir of the Year from Independent Publishers Association. She has been a writer in residence in many remote locations from the Petrified Forest to Iceland. She also installed the large metal haiku signs—a haiku by Chiyo-ni—on Santa Fe’s west side.
Charles Trumbull is retired from editing and publishing positions at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Encyclopædia Britannica. A past president of the Haiku Society of America and recipient of its Sora Award for service to the HSA, he was a co-organizer of Haiku North America 1999 and from 2006 to 2013 was editor of Modern Haiku. In 2013–14 he was Honorary Curator of the American Haiku Archives, and he served as secretary of the New Mexico State Poetry Society in 2013. Trumbull’s critical articles on the history of haiku have appeared widely in the journals and online. A haiku chapbook, Between the Chimes, was published in 2011 and A Five-Balloon Morning, his book of New Mexico haiku, in June 2013.
Scott Wiggerman’s Leaf and Beak: Sonnets is a finalist for the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry with the Texas Institute of Letters. He has two previous collections--Presence, and Vegetables and Other Relationships. Wiggerman has served as editor of several books, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga, and Bearing the Mask. Recent poems have appeared in Chrysanthemum, Red Earth Review, Frogpond, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Naugatuck River Review, and many other publications. He is a cofounder and editor for Dos Gatos Press. His website is http://swig.tripod.com.
Haiku North America 2017 Presenters
Elaine Parker Adams, a retired African American educator, ventured into haiku in response to the events of September 11, and her poems were included in a Houston Community College memorial anthology. Inspired by her citizenship class student, Dominican writer René Rodríguez Soriano, she now writes haiku about social themes affecting her hometown of New Orleans and lifespan issues. In 2013, she published her great grandfather’s biography--The Reverend Peter W. Clark: Sweet Preacher and Steadfast Reformer.
Melissa Allen, who is the author of the haiku blog Red Dragonfly, lives in Madison, Wis. She has edited for Haijinx and the Haiku Society of America, and is on the advisory board of the American Haiku Archives. Her haiga often push the boundaries of the form with experiments in found poems, found images and graphic presentations of other texts such as haibun.
Tiffany Austin received her BA in English from Spelman College, MFA in creative writing from Chicago State University, JD from Northeastern, and PhD in English from Saint Louis University. Her main research interests include African Diaspora studies, including African American, Caribbean, Afro-Latino(a) and African literature. Austin has received a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and most recently was awarded an artist fellowship grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission. She currently teaches rhetorical and creative writing at The University of The Bahamas.
Francine Banwarth found haiku in 1987 while she was raising three children and volunteering for the nuclear disarmament organizations WAND and SANE/FREEZE. She was mentored in the Raymond Roseliep/Bill Pauly “school of haiku,” and her haiku, haibun, and rengay have been published in a variety of journals, contests, and anthologies. She helped organize activities in the Dubuque, IA, and Mineral Point, WI, haiku communities and served as HSA second vice-president from 2008 through 2010. In 2012 she was named editor of Frogpond and served in that capacity from 2012 through 2015. She also served on the board of Modern Haiku for 3 years and has been an avid runner for 39 years. “Haiku inspiration begins in the feet and works its way up through the body, mind, and spirit.”
Donna Beaver is an Alaska Native (Tlingit / Tsimshian) poet and artist. In 2000 she was awarded the Alaska Native Writer’s Award for Literature from the University of Alaska. Her latest book is an artist book entitled, Rainforest Poems (House of Haiku, 2014). Donna is coproducer and cohost of the podcast, Haiku Chronicles.
Brad Bennett teaches third and fourth graders at Fayerweather Street School in Cambridge, Mass. His work was featured in A New Resonance 9: Emerging Voices in English-language Haiku (Red Moon Press, 2015). His first full-length book of haiku, a drop of pond (Red Moon Press, 2016), won a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award.
Maxianne Berger is active in both the English- and French-speaking haiku and tanka communities in Canada. With Mike Montreuil she co-edits the on-line journal Cirrus: tankas de nos jours. She is the author of four poetry books and has coedited three anthologies, one of haiku and two of tanka. Although she abandoned traditional lyric poetry for Japanese genres after the turn of the millennium, she also enjoys the challenge of OuLiPo constraints, ergo her recent haiku collection, Winnows. She lives in Montréal.
Margaret Chula has given performances, readings, and workshops at Haiku North America since 1993. Her haibun “Well of Beauty” was awarded first prize in the Genjuan International Haibun Contest and several have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 1994 she and Rich Youmans created haibunku, a new form of linked haibun, which they have collected in their book Shadow Lines.
Sonia Coman-Ernstoff is an art historian and a poet, fluent in English, French, Italian, Japanese, and Romanian. She received her B.A. in Art History and Studio Art from Harvard University and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University in New York, writing her dissertation on cross-cultural exchange through the lens of 19th-century Japanese and French ceramics. Sonia is an avid reader and writer of Japanese poetry forms (haiku, tanka, renku); her forthcoming haiku book, Passages, features poems written in multiple languages and the author’s translations.
Jerome Cushman taught theatre and dance courses among many other subjects at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, a college at the Rochester Institute of Technology from 1974 until 2005. Haiku was a tool used in both English and theatre classes.
Terri L. French is a poet/writer and retired massage therapist living in Huntsville, Ala. She served as Southeast Coordinator of the Haiku Society of America and was formerly editor of Prune Juice: Journal of Senryu, Kyoka & Haiga. She was recently named Secretary and member of the Board of Directors of the Haiku Foundation. Terri is also a member of the Huntsville Literary Society and published a book of local history, Huntsville Textile Mills & Villages: Linthead Legacy. Her haiku, senryu, haibun, and haiga appear in numerous online and print publications.
Shinko Fushimi is a professor of the Aikoku Gakuen University in
Japan. Her research interests include the comparative study of translation, especially of waka (tanka) poems in The Tale of Genji; modern Japanese literature in the light of modern Western critical theories; and Jane Austen. She is a member of the English Literary Society of Japan, the Jane Austen Society in the UK, the Institute for the Synergy of Arts and Sciences, and the United Poets Laureate International. She received the Academic Award of the Institute for the Synergy of Arts and Sciences in 2009 for her comparative study of English translations of The Tale of Genji.
William Scott Galasso is the author of fourteen books of poetry, including Collage (New and Selected Poems), published in 2012, and Silver Salmon Runes, published in 2016 on Createspace.
Garry Gay--see HNA Board members above.
Natalie Goldberg is the author of 15 books, including Writing Down the Bones, which has sold two million copies, and most recently The Great Spring: Writing Zen and this Zigzag Life.
Veronica Golos is the author of three poetry books: A Bell Buried Deep (Story Line Press); Vocabulary of Silence (Red Hen Press); Rootwork (3: A Taos Press). She is the coeditor of the Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art and the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, a core faculty member of Tupelo Press’s Writing Conferences, and the coordinator of the Taos National Poetry Month.
Carolyn Hall found her way to haiku in 1999. Her haiku collections include Water Lines (Snapshot Press, 2006), How to Paint the Finch’s Song (Red Moon Press, 2010), and The Doors All Unlocked (Red Moon Press, 2012) — each of which has won the HSA Merit Book Award, the Touchstone Distinguished Book Award, and/or the Snapshot Press book award. Her newest collection is Calculus of Daylilies (Red Moon Press, 2017.) She is a former editor of Mariposa and Acorn. She is an active member (and officer) of the Haiku Poets of Northern California.
Penny Harter is co-author of The Haiku Handbook and a past-president of the HSA. Her work appears in numerous print and on-line journals and anthologies, and among her over twenty published books and chapbooks, six feature haiku and related genres, especially the recent Recycling Starlight and the prize-winning e-chapbook One Bowl (haibun). A featured reader at the 2010 Dodge Festival, Harter has received three poetry fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, an award from the Poetry Society of America, and two fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Marshall Hryciuk grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, the steel-town of Canada, and moved up the road to Toronto to take a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Toronto. He writes haiku, longpoems, symboliste translations, long-form poetry, and VZWL poems and publishes under the Nietzsche’s Brolly and Imago Press imprints. Having led over 45 renku world-wide, Catkin Press published his petals in the dark, a selection of 15 of these, in 2015.
Jean Ann Hunt is Associate Professor of Literacy Education at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and a new student of haiku.
Jim Kacian is founder and president of The Haiku Foundation, www.thehaikufoundation.org, a non-profit organization whose mission is to archive our first century of achievement in English-language haiku, and to create new opportunities for our second; founder and owner of Red Moon Press, the largest and most awarded press dedicated to haiku outside Japan; editor-in-chief of Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W. W. Norton, 2013); editor of dozens of other books of haiku; and author of a score of books of poetry, primarily haiku. More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Kacian and www.redmoonpress.com.
Bill Kenney was born just outside of Boston and has lived in New York for more than fifty years. His haiku are very much the haiku of a city boy, even if the city boy spends an occasional weekend in the country. Since he began writing haiku, a month before his 72nd birthday, his work has appeared in many haiku journals and has frequently been included in anthologies.
Deborah P Kolodji--see HNA Board members above.
Teruko Kumei is Professor at Shirayuri University in Tokyo, teaching American history and culture. Since 2000 she has collected documents of Japanese traditional short poetry, haiku, senryu, and tanka in the United States. She has published about 20 articles on this subject.
David G. Lanoue is a professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana. He has translated haiku collections from Japanese and Spanish, and he maintains the Haiku of Kobayashi Issa website.
Thomas Leech has more than 40 years’ experience in printing, paper-making, and related book-arts. Since 2001 he has been a curator at the New Mexico History Museum, and he is director of the Press at the Palace of the Governors, which received the 2014 Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design, the 2015 Edgar Lee Hewett Award from the New Mexico Association of Museums, the 2013 City of Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. Leech was a member of the 1990 and ’92 Everest Environmental Expeditions and in 1994 co-founded the Paper Road/Tibet Project, teaching traditional paper-making to disabled and orphaned children in Tibet. Since 2010, Tom has facilitated Alzheimer’s Poetry Project events at the New Mexico History Museum.
Robert T. Lundy appears in collections that include Analog Science Fiction and The Atlanta Review, as well as HNA journals. An avid hiker and observer of nature, he is a retired software engineer and demographer. Bob’s background in directing community theater becomes apparent when he delivers his many poetry and chapbook presentations with Elizabeth Williams.
Patricia J. Machmiller is a poet who started writing haiku in 1975 with Kiyoshi and Kiyoko Tokutomi and who in a past life managed the manufacture of the Trident missile, the third leg of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Her two books of haiku are Blush of Winter Moon (Jacaranda Press, 2000) and Utopia: She Hurries On (Swamp Press, forthcoming). She has four books of haiga, Mountain Trail: Following the Master, The Sweet Reverence of Little Birds, Wild Heart of One Bird Singing, and Yard Birds: The Impertinence of Ordinary (all four at www.lulu.com). The last three books were done in collaboration with the artist, Floy Zittin, and the calligrapher, Martha Dahlen. She is also a brush painter and printmaker; her artwork, including some haiga, can be seen at www.patriciajmachmiller.com.
Carole MacRury, poet and photographer, resides in Point Roberts, WA, a unique peninsula and border town that inspires her work. Her poems have won awards and been published widely in North American and international journals and anthologies. Her photographs appear on the covers of journals, anthologies, and chapbooks and as interior illustrations. She is the author of In the Company of Crows: Haiku and Tanka Between the Tides (Black Cat Press, 2008) and an award-winning e-chapbook, The Tang of Nasturtiums (Snapshot Press 2012).
Jeannie Martin discovered haiku poetry in 1999 and has been an avid reader, writer, and teacher of haiku ever since. A social worker, she most enjoys teaching haiku with prison inmates serving life sentences, homeless older men, nursing home residents, and in community based programs. She has taught haiku courses at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education for the past 9 years, and leads haiku retreats. She has published haiku in journals and anthologies and is the author of several chapbooks as well as the book, Clear Water: A Haiku Journey into Our Luminous, Sacred World.
Scott Mason set out on the haiku path in 2001. In the years since then his poems have been widely published and have received over 150 awards in competition including more than 20 first place finishes. He currently serves as an associate editor with The Heron’s Nest and as an executive committee member of the Katonah Poetry Series, now celebrating its 50th year.
Vicki McCullough is coordinator for the BC & Territories region of Haiku Canada and contributes to the Haiku Canada Review. She was a cofounder of the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational and a co-organizer of the former Gabriola Haiku Gathering. Vicki resides in Vancouver.
Peter McDonald is the Dean of Library Services at Fresno State and the senior editor of Juxtapositions: The Journal of Research and Scholarship in Haiku. Peter has also served as the Director of the Fresno Poets Association, has built the Interactive Poetry Lab in his library with U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, and is a widely published author of books, essays, and poetry.
Tanya McDonald is known for her love of birds, haiku, and drinking tea. Brightly-plumaged, she is currently serving as vice-president of Haiku Northwest in the Seattle/Eastside area. Her favorite place to lose herself is in a library.
Joe McKeon has recently been recognized in New Resonance 10: Emerging Voices in English Language Haiku. His work has won recognition in international contests including the Robert Spiess Contest, the Harold G. Henderson contest, the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Contest, the Gene Murtha Senryu Contest, the Japanese Embassy (JICC) contest, and the “Three Rivers” contest in Ivanić Grad, Croatia.
Beverly Acuff Momoi writes in a variety of forms of poetry and has a particular interest in Japanese short forms. Her poems have appeared in publications including Acorn, Bones, Contemporary Haibun Online, Frogpond, Mariposa, and Modern Haiku, among others. Her haiku has been featured in A New Resonance 9: Emerging Voices in English Language Haiku, Haiku 2015, and Galaxy of Dust: The Red Moon Press Anthology of English-Language Haiku 2015. Her haibun collection, Lifting the Towhee’s Song, was a Snapshot Press eChapbook Award winner.
Kris Moon (Kris Kondo), an artist, writer, and teacher, has been studying and writing haiku since her first trip to Japan as a teenager. By now having lived and taught in Japan for more than 40 years, she is also active in the North American haiku community, Her haiga often feature abstract, layered digital images with haiku or tanka arrayed expressively on floating lines.
Elizabeth Morley served as the Principal of the Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto for 22 years. She is now visiting scholar at Shinwa Women’s University in Kobe, Japan. Her publications may be found in the Journal of the Learning Sciences and the textbook From the Laboratory to the Classroom: Translating the Science of Learning for Teachers (Routledge) among others. Her current research focuses on her belief in the value of environmental awareness in children’s learning and to the institute’s book, Natural Curiosity, Building Children’s Understanding of the World Through Environmental Inquiry (www.naturalcuriosity.ca/).
Note: Unfortunately, Elizabeth cannot attend HNA; her presentation will be read by Makoto Nakanishi.
Katherine J. Munro (kjmunro) originally was from Vancouver, BC, but now lives in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. She is Membership Secretary for Haiku Canada, and is an Associate Member of the League of Canadian Poets. In 2014, she founded “solstice haiku,” a monthly haiku discussion group that she continues to facilitate. She has two leaflets with Leaf Press, and, along with crime fiction writer Jessica Simon, she co-edited Body of Evidence: A Collection of Killer ’Ku, an anthology of crime-related haiku.
Makoto Nakanishi is a professor at Ehime University, Faculty of Education, in Matsuyama, Japan. He has conducted research extensively on haiku education in primary and secondary schools.
Nick Virgilio Haiku Association was founded in 1989 to promote the writing of haiku poetry, to provide encouragement and support to young people to write poetry, and to further the work and poetry of Camden haiku poet Nick Virgilio. The Association is pleased to present the film Remembering Nick Virgilio by Sean Dougherty, and the filmed play Nick of Time … Nick of Time by Joe Paprzycki. Persons involved in the presentation of the play are producer Henry Brann (NVHA); director and video editing John Doyle (Iron Age Theater); actors Bob Weick (Nick Virgilio), Rocky Wilson (Walt Whitman), Ned Pryce (Nightline production assistant and Nick’s brother, Larry Virgilio); director of videography and video editing John Doyle; videographers Marc Brodzik and Andrew Geller (Woodshop Films); sound engineer Andrew Geller; fundraising, publicity, and on-site buzz management Robin Palley and Donna Beaver; and instigator-in-chief Al Pizzarelli.
Tom Painting, in addition to writing haiku, is an avid birdwatcher, hiker, and traveler. He teaches literature and creative writing at the Paideia School in Atlanta, GA.
Linda M. Papanicolaou is an art historian and art teacher in the Bay Area of California. She is a member of the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, Haiku Poets of Northern California, and the Haiku Society of America. For the past 11 years she has edited Haigaonline.
Jacquie Pearce has written ten novels for children and a collection of short stories for young adults, as well as nonfiction prose and poetry. Her haiku have been featured in a variety of journals and anthologies. Jacquie is coeditor with Angela Naccarato of The Jade Pond, a haiku collection inspired by Vancouver’s Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden.
Alan Pizzarelli has been writing haiku, senyru, and related forms for more than four decades. Pizzarelli studied under the tutelage of Prof. Harold G. Henderson in New York City and has published 13 collections of poetry, including his latest book, Frozen Socks: New and Selected Short Poems (House of Haiku, 2015). His work has been widely anthologized in major journals and books. He is co-producer and cohost of the podcast, Haiku Chronicles.
Claudia Coutu Radmore has been writing lyric and Japanese forms since the early 1990s. She is the past president of KaDo, the Ottawa haiku group, and is the Haiku Canada members’ representative for Ontario. Her most recent haiku collection is the business of isness (2017). Your Hands Discover Me/ Tes mains me découvrent (2010), is a collection of bilingual tanka. With Marco Fraticelli she coedited The Touch of a Moth (2013), the Haiku Canada 35th-year anthology, and the two are busy coediting Wordless, this year’s 40th anniversary members’ anthology. Claudia created Catkin Press in 2013 and has published collections by Marco Fraticelli, Philomene Kocher, Hans Jongman, Anna Vakar, kjmunro and Jessica Simon, and Grant Savage, as well as the haibun memoirs of Hans Jongman and Guy Simser.
Preethi Ramaprasad has been studying the bharatanatyam style of classical Indian dance with Prof. Sudharani Raghupathy for the past 22 years. Born and raised in the United States, she has made annual visits to India to train with her guru. From 2011 to 2012 she taught school in New York City with the Teach for America organization and now pursues bharatanatyam professionally. She lives in San Francisco.
Kala Ramesh’s love for haiku and her initiatives culminated in the formation of “IN Haiku” in 2013 — to get Indian haiku poets under one umbrella to promote, enjoy, and sink deeper into the beauty and intricacies of haiku and allied Japanese short forms of poetry. In collaboration with artists, musicians, and dancers, she has had several readings in public places. She is editor-in-chief of Naad Anunaad: an Anthology of Contemporary World Haiku.
Cristina Rascón-Castro is a Mexican writer and translator of Japanese poetry into Spanish. She has produced collections by contemporary poets Shuntarō Tanikawa, Keijiro Suga, and Seino Chisato as well as a trilingual (Japanese, Spanish, Nahuatl) book of haiku by Chiyo-ni. Cristina’s own books of haiku in Spanish, include one for children, Zoológico de palabritas (Andraval/Japan Foundation). She has received creative writing and translating scholarships, attended artistic residences in five countries and published haiku, poetry, essays, and short stories in a dozen languages. She is director of Skribalia: Online Global School for Writers and teaches haiku and creative writing in several institutions. Find Cristina on the Web at www.http://cristinarascon.com.mx/en and www.skribalia.com.
Ce Rosenow’s research explores the relationship between American poetry and Japan. Related articles have appeared in Literary Imagination, Papers on Language and Literature, and Philological Quarterly. She coedited with Bob Arnold The Next One Thousand Years: The Selected Poems of Cid Corman. She is the former president of the Haiku Society of America and the publisher of Mountains and Rivers Press in Eugene, Ore.
Alexis Rotella is an award-winning author who specializes in Japanese poetry forms. She was president of The Haiku Society of America as well as Frogpond editor in 1984. She started a number of journals including Brussels Sprout and Prune Juice. Her work has been included in the major haiku anthologies. She coedited The Ash Moon Anthology, poems on aging (2008, MET Press). Her latest haiku collection is Between Waves (2015, Red Moon Press). Rotella is also a digital artist who exhibits locally, on the Web, and most recently in Italy and Portugal. She is currently the judge for Ito-en Haiku Contest. Rotella practices classical acupuncture and bioresonance technology in Arnold, Md.
Robert Rotella is a patent/copyright attorney, worked in private industry, a prestigious DC law firm, and most recently NASA. Retired, he is cochair of the local score chapter where he counsels people in starting their own businesses. Now and then he writes a haiku.
Lidia Rozmus received a master’s degree in history of art from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and later studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1980 she has made her home in the sovereign Republic of Mole Hill, near Chicago. She works as a graphic designer, paints sumi-e and oils, writes haiku. She shows her work in the U.S., Poland, and Japan. She has written and designed several prizewinning fine art portfolios and books of haiku, haibun, and haiga. Lidia is art editor of Modern Haiku and art director at Deep North Press.
Miriam Sagan--see HNA 2017 Organizing Committee members above.
Meta Schettler is an associate professor in the Africana Studies Program at California State University, Fresno. Her research interests include postcolonialism, African and African American literature, and South African politics and culture. She has papers published in the International Journal of Africana Studies, Obsidian, Valley Voices, Abafazi, BMa: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review, and Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies.
Rich Schnell is a SUNY Distinguished Professor of Counseling at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. He is past Chair of the New York Board for Mental Health Practitioners. Rich is an addictions specialist, a mental health psychotherapist and teacher, and has used haiku, and presented on its use, in the U.S., Bhutan, Canada, and Romania. Rich has taught graduate courses in Zen Therapy and Haiku as Meditation & Healing.
Zoanne Schnell is a Professor Emeritus of Nursing at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, and has worked with Rich Schnell in presenting training programs for health & mental health professionals using haiku and mindfulness in Bhutan and Romania.
Dan Schwerin came to haiku through old issues of American Haiku in a northern Wisconsin library, and he gratefully acknowledges the help given him by many fine Midwestern mentors. His poems reflect the rounds made in a vocation as United Methodist minister in suburban Milwaukee. His first published haiku collection, θRS, received a Touchstone Award for Distinguished Books from the Haiku Foundation in 2015. Schwerin also facilitates the monthly meeting of Haiku Waukesha in Waukesha, Wis.
Henry Shukman (Ryu’un-ken) is an Associate Master of the Sanbo Zen lineage, based in Kamakura, Japan, and is the Guiding Teacher at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe. He has an MA from Cambridge (UK) and an M.Litt from St Andrews University, and is a writer and poet of British-Jewish origin, who has published eight books of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. He writes regularly for Tricycle, The New York Times, and other publications. His most recent book is the poetry collection Archangel.
Karen Sohne has written haiku for a while and renku for a bit less. While Marshall leads the renku, I try to facilitate. If you’ve not done a Marshall-led renku before, don’t be shy, my role is to help you along (explaining and encouraging), while Marshall charts the course of the renku. Hope to see old and new renku friends there.
Carmen Sterba — Carmen Sterba is at home in Washington State or Kamakura, Japan. She has been both the secretary and 1st vice-president of the Haiku Society of America. Her new chapbook, An Amazement of Deer, combines original deer-related photos, haiku, and rengay, plus deer haiku composed by twenty poets.
John Stevenson is a former president of the Haiku Society of America (2000), former editor of Frogpond (2003–2008) and current managing editor of The Heron’s Nest (since 2008).
Jessica Tremblay is a haiku poet and cartoonist. Her Old Pond Comics (www.oldpondcomics.com) have been featured in haiku journals in Canada, France, the U.S., and Japan. She’s been cartoonist-in-residence at Haiku North America, Seabeck Haiku Getaway, Haiku Canada Weekend, and Haiku Hot Springs.
Charles Trumbull--see HNA 2017 Organizing Committee members above.
Cipriano Vigil — A native of the village of Chamisal, N.M., he has devoted his life to the collection, performance, teaching, and preservation of the Hispanic music of New Mexico. Vigil has been honored as a Living Treasure, has received the Governor’s Award, and the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities Award, and has been nominated three times for the National Heritage Award for outstanding work in maintaining and preserving traditional folk music. He crafts many of his own guitars (notably out of cigar boxes!), has taught college courses, and recently published a book about New Mexico folklore. At the HNA Fiesta del Haikú, he is accompanied by his son, Cipriano Pablo Vigil, and daughter, Felicita Vigil Piñón. See more at http://newmexicofolkmusictreasure.com.
Julie Warther facilitates the Ohaio-ku Study Group in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and serves as Midwest Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America. She was instrumental in the creation of the Forest Haiku Walk at the Holmes County Open Air Art Museum in Millersburg, Ohio. Her work was selected to appear in A New Resonance 9 (Red Moon Press, 2015), and she is privileged to serve as an assistant editor for The Living Senryu Anthology.
Michael Dylan Welch--see HNA Board members above.
Don Wentworth is a Pittsburgh-based poet whose work reflects his interest in the revelatory nature of brief, haiku-like moments in everyday life. He is the author of three full-length poetry collections published by Six Gallery Press: Past All Traps (2011), Yield to the Willow (2014), and With a Deepening Presence (2016). Past All Traps was shortlisted for the Haiku Foundation’s 2011 Touchstone Distinguished Books Award.
Scott Wiggerman --see HNA 2017 Organizing Committee members above.
Elizabeth Yahn Williams is an award-winning ekphrastic poet and author/editor of over two dozen books and chapbooks. Her creative arts grants include awards from Ford Foundation through UCLA, LMU, Publishers and Writers of San Diego, Publishing University, Vermont Studio Center, National Audio Theatre, Queen Mary College of the University of London, England, SLS in Montreal, Canada, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts–Auvillar, France. With her Partner-in-Rhyme, Bob Lundy, she has presented national workshops and inaugurated the “Downtown Verse” Program for the San Diego Public Library. Her new HAIKU for an Artist series is written in the form of a parallel reader with the first two books in French and Spanish respectively.
Kathabela Wilson is creator of Poets on Site, with concentrations on haiku and tanka. She prompts and leads haiku and tanka workshops online, in museums and gardens, hosts three poetry meetings a week, and organizes many salons featuring visiting poets. Kathabela was one of Two Autumns readers for Haiku Poets of Northern CA in 2014. She specializes in performance poetry accompanied by Rick’s flutes of the world and publishes in anthologies and journals worldwide.
Rick Wilson is a collector and player of historical flutes since 1980. He recently retired from Caltech as Professor Emeritus of Mathematics. He has expanded his interests and collection since 2001 to include playing flutes of the world, including traditional Japanese, Chinese, Central Asian, Native American, and Eastern European and beyond. Together they travel the world collecting instruments and participating in mathematics conferences.
Ruth Yarrow is an environmental educator, activist, and organizer for peace, justice, and a sustainable planet. She has been writing haiku for over forty years and has had six books of haiku published. She lives in Ithaca, N.Y., near her two children and their families.
Yoko’s Dogs (Jane Munro, Susan Gillis, Mary di Michele, and Jan Conn) is a collaborative group of poets dedicated to writing in Japanese forms. Whisk was published by Pedlar Press (2013) and Rhinoceros by Gaspereau (2016). Visit them at yokosdogs.com.
Karina M. Young, a member of Haiku Poets of Northern California and Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, has been writing and publishing haiku and tanka since 2000. Through the Lupines, a chapbook of her haiku, was a co-winner of The Snapshot Press eChapbook Award 2016 and is forthcoming as an online collection. Eucalyptus Wind, published in 2017 by Red Moon Press, is her first full-length collection of haiku. A longtime educator, she currently freelances and helps run her spouse’s contracting business in Salinas, California.
John Zheng is professor and chair of the Department of English at Mississippi Valley State University. His edited books include The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku, African American Haiku: Cultural Visions, and Conversations with Sterling Plumpp (University Press of Mississippi).
Melissa Allen, who is the author of the haiku blog Red Dragonfly, lives in Madison, Wis. She has edited for Haijinx and the Haiku Society of America, and is on the advisory board of the American Haiku Archives. Her haiga often push the boundaries of the form with experiments in found poems, found images and graphic presentations of other texts such as haibun.
Tiffany Austin received her BA in English from Spelman College, MFA in creative writing from Chicago State University, JD from Northeastern, and PhD in English from Saint Louis University. Her main research interests include African Diaspora studies, including African American, Caribbean, Afro-Latino(a) and African literature. Austin has received a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and most recently was awarded an artist fellowship grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission. She currently teaches rhetorical and creative writing at The University of The Bahamas.
Francine Banwarth found haiku in 1987 while she was raising three children and volunteering for the nuclear disarmament organizations WAND and SANE/FREEZE. She was mentored in the Raymond Roseliep/Bill Pauly “school of haiku,” and her haiku, haibun, and rengay have been published in a variety of journals, contests, and anthologies. She helped organize activities in the Dubuque, IA, and Mineral Point, WI, haiku communities and served as HSA second vice-president from 2008 through 2010. In 2012 she was named editor of Frogpond and served in that capacity from 2012 through 2015. She also served on the board of Modern Haiku for 3 years and has been an avid runner for 39 years. “Haiku inspiration begins in the feet and works its way up through the body, mind, and spirit.”
Donna Beaver is an Alaska Native (Tlingit / Tsimshian) poet and artist. In 2000 she was awarded the Alaska Native Writer’s Award for Literature from the University of Alaska. Her latest book is an artist book entitled, Rainforest Poems (House of Haiku, 2014). Donna is coproducer and cohost of the podcast, Haiku Chronicles.
Brad Bennett teaches third and fourth graders at Fayerweather Street School in Cambridge, Mass. His work was featured in A New Resonance 9: Emerging Voices in English-language Haiku (Red Moon Press, 2015). His first full-length book of haiku, a drop of pond (Red Moon Press, 2016), won a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award.
Maxianne Berger is active in both the English- and French-speaking haiku and tanka communities in Canada. With Mike Montreuil she co-edits the on-line journal Cirrus: tankas de nos jours. She is the author of four poetry books and has coedited three anthologies, one of haiku and two of tanka. Although she abandoned traditional lyric poetry for Japanese genres after the turn of the millennium, she also enjoys the challenge of OuLiPo constraints, ergo her recent haiku collection, Winnows. She lives in Montréal.
Margaret Chula has given performances, readings, and workshops at Haiku North America since 1993. Her haibun “Well of Beauty” was awarded first prize in the Genjuan International Haibun Contest and several have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 1994 she and Rich Youmans created haibunku, a new form of linked haibun, which they have collected in their book Shadow Lines.
Sonia Coman-Ernstoff is an art historian and a poet, fluent in English, French, Italian, Japanese, and Romanian. She received her B.A. in Art History and Studio Art from Harvard University and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University in New York, writing her dissertation on cross-cultural exchange through the lens of 19th-century Japanese and French ceramics. Sonia is an avid reader and writer of Japanese poetry forms (haiku, tanka, renku); her forthcoming haiku book, Passages, features poems written in multiple languages and the author’s translations.
Jerome Cushman taught theatre and dance courses among many other subjects at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, a college at the Rochester Institute of Technology from 1974 until 2005. Haiku was a tool used in both English and theatre classes.
Terri L. French is a poet/writer and retired massage therapist living in Huntsville, Ala. She served as Southeast Coordinator of the Haiku Society of America and was formerly editor of Prune Juice: Journal of Senryu, Kyoka & Haiga. She was recently named Secretary and member of the Board of Directors of the Haiku Foundation. Terri is also a member of the Huntsville Literary Society and published a book of local history, Huntsville Textile Mills & Villages: Linthead Legacy. Her haiku, senryu, haibun, and haiga appear in numerous online and print publications.
Shinko Fushimi is a professor of the Aikoku Gakuen University in
Japan. Her research interests include the comparative study of translation, especially of waka (tanka) poems in The Tale of Genji; modern Japanese literature in the light of modern Western critical theories; and Jane Austen. She is a member of the English Literary Society of Japan, the Jane Austen Society in the UK, the Institute for the Synergy of Arts and Sciences, and the United Poets Laureate International. She received the Academic Award of the Institute for the Synergy of Arts and Sciences in 2009 for her comparative study of English translations of The Tale of Genji.
William Scott Galasso is the author of fourteen books of poetry, including Collage (New and Selected Poems), published in 2012, and Silver Salmon Runes, published in 2016 on Createspace.
Garry Gay--see HNA Board members above.
Natalie Goldberg is the author of 15 books, including Writing Down the Bones, which has sold two million copies, and most recently The Great Spring: Writing Zen and this Zigzag Life.
Veronica Golos is the author of three poetry books: A Bell Buried Deep (Story Line Press); Vocabulary of Silence (Red Hen Press); Rootwork (3: A Taos Press). She is the coeditor of the Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art and the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, a core faculty member of Tupelo Press’s Writing Conferences, and the coordinator of the Taos National Poetry Month.
Carolyn Hall found her way to haiku in 1999. Her haiku collections include Water Lines (Snapshot Press, 2006), How to Paint the Finch’s Song (Red Moon Press, 2010), and The Doors All Unlocked (Red Moon Press, 2012) — each of which has won the HSA Merit Book Award, the Touchstone Distinguished Book Award, and/or the Snapshot Press book award. Her newest collection is Calculus of Daylilies (Red Moon Press, 2017.) She is a former editor of Mariposa and Acorn. She is an active member (and officer) of the Haiku Poets of Northern California.
Penny Harter is co-author of The Haiku Handbook and a past-president of the HSA. Her work appears in numerous print and on-line journals and anthologies, and among her over twenty published books and chapbooks, six feature haiku and related genres, especially the recent Recycling Starlight and the prize-winning e-chapbook One Bowl (haibun). A featured reader at the 2010 Dodge Festival, Harter has received three poetry fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, an award from the Poetry Society of America, and two fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Marshall Hryciuk grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, the steel-town of Canada, and moved up the road to Toronto to take a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Toronto. He writes haiku, longpoems, symboliste translations, long-form poetry, and VZWL poems and publishes under the Nietzsche’s Brolly and Imago Press imprints. Having led over 45 renku world-wide, Catkin Press published his petals in the dark, a selection of 15 of these, in 2015.
Jean Ann Hunt is Associate Professor of Literacy Education at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and a new student of haiku.
Jim Kacian is founder and president of The Haiku Foundation, www.thehaikufoundation.org, a non-profit organization whose mission is to archive our first century of achievement in English-language haiku, and to create new opportunities for our second; founder and owner of Red Moon Press, the largest and most awarded press dedicated to haiku outside Japan; editor-in-chief of Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W. W. Norton, 2013); editor of dozens of other books of haiku; and author of a score of books of poetry, primarily haiku. More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Kacian and www.redmoonpress.com.
Bill Kenney was born just outside of Boston and has lived in New York for more than fifty years. His haiku are very much the haiku of a city boy, even if the city boy spends an occasional weekend in the country. Since he began writing haiku, a month before his 72nd birthday, his work has appeared in many haiku journals and has frequently been included in anthologies.
Deborah P Kolodji--see HNA Board members above.
Teruko Kumei is Professor at Shirayuri University in Tokyo, teaching American history and culture. Since 2000 she has collected documents of Japanese traditional short poetry, haiku, senryu, and tanka in the United States. She has published about 20 articles on this subject.
David G. Lanoue is a professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana. He has translated haiku collections from Japanese and Spanish, and he maintains the Haiku of Kobayashi Issa website.
Thomas Leech has more than 40 years’ experience in printing, paper-making, and related book-arts. Since 2001 he has been a curator at the New Mexico History Museum, and he is director of the Press at the Palace of the Governors, which received the 2014 Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design, the 2015 Edgar Lee Hewett Award from the New Mexico Association of Museums, the 2013 City of Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. Leech was a member of the 1990 and ’92 Everest Environmental Expeditions and in 1994 co-founded the Paper Road/Tibet Project, teaching traditional paper-making to disabled and orphaned children in Tibet. Since 2010, Tom has facilitated Alzheimer’s Poetry Project events at the New Mexico History Museum.
Robert T. Lundy appears in collections that include Analog Science Fiction and The Atlanta Review, as well as HNA journals. An avid hiker and observer of nature, he is a retired software engineer and demographer. Bob’s background in directing community theater becomes apparent when he delivers his many poetry and chapbook presentations with Elizabeth Williams.
Patricia J. Machmiller is a poet who started writing haiku in 1975 with Kiyoshi and Kiyoko Tokutomi and who in a past life managed the manufacture of the Trident missile, the third leg of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Her two books of haiku are Blush of Winter Moon (Jacaranda Press, 2000) and Utopia: She Hurries On (Swamp Press, forthcoming). She has four books of haiga, Mountain Trail: Following the Master, The Sweet Reverence of Little Birds, Wild Heart of One Bird Singing, and Yard Birds: The Impertinence of Ordinary (all four at www.lulu.com). The last three books were done in collaboration with the artist, Floy Zittin, and the calligrapher, Martha Dahlen. She is also a brush painter and printmaker; her artwork, including some haiga, can be seen at www.patriciajmachmiller.com.
Carole MacRury, poet and photographer, resides in Point Roberts, WA, a unique peninsula and border town that inspires her work. Her poems have won awards and been published widely in North American and international journals and anthologies. Her photographs appear on the covers of journals, anthologies, and chapbooks and as interior illustrations. She is the author of In the Company of Crows: Haiku and Tanka Between the Tides (Black Cat Press, 2008) and an award-winning e-chapbook, The Tang of Nasturtiums (Snapshot Press 2012).
Jeannie Martin discovered haiku poetry in 1999 and has been an avid reader, writer, and teacher of haiku ever since. A social worker, she most enjoys teaching haiku with prison inmates serving life sentences, homeless older men, nursing home residents, and in community based programs. She has taught haiku courses at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education for the past 9 years, and leads haiku retreats. She has published haiku in journals and anthologies and is the author of several chapbooks as well as the book, Clear Water: A Haiku Journey into Our Luminous, Sacred World.
Scott Mason set out on the haiku path in 2001. In the years since then his poems have been widely published and have received over 150 awards in competition including more than 20 first place finishes. He currently serves as an associate editor with The Heron’s Nest and as an executive committee member of the Katonah Poetry Series, now celebrating its 50th year.
Vicki McCullough is coordinator for the BC & Territories region of Haiku Canada and contributes to the Haiku Canada Review. She was a cofounder of the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational and a co-organizer of the former Gabriola Haiku Gathering. Vicki resides in Vancouver.
Peter McDonald is the Dean of Library Services at Fresno State and the senior editor of Juxtapositions: The Journal of Research and Scholarship in Haiku. Peter has also served as the Director of the Fresno Poets Association, has built the Interactive Poetry Lab in his library with U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, and is a widely published author of books, essays, and poetry.
Tanya McDonald is known for her love of birds, haiku, and drinking tea. Brightly-plumaged, she is currently serving as vice-president of Haiku Northwest in the Seattle/Eastside area. Her favorite place to lose herself is in a library.
Joe McKeon has recently been recognized in New Resonance 10: Emerging Voices in English Language Haiku. His work has won recognition in international contests including the Robert Spiess Contest, the Harold G. Henderson contest, the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Contest, the Gene Murtha Senryu Contest, the Japanese Embassy (JICC) contest, and the “Three Rivers” contest in Ivanić Grad, Croatia.
Beverly Acuff Momoi writes in a variety of forms of poetry and has a particular interest in Japanese short forms. Her poems have appeared in publications including Acorn, Bones, Contemporary Haibun Online, Frogpond, Mariposa, and Modern Haiku, among others. Her haiku has been featured in A New Resonance 9: Emerging Voices in English Language Haiku, Haiku 2015, and Galaxy of Dust: The Red Moon Press Anthology of English-Language Haiku 2015. Her haibun collection, Lifting the Towhee’s Song, was a Snapshot Press eChapbook Award winner.
Kris Moon (Kris Kondo), an artist, writer, and teacher, has been studying and writing haiku since her first trip to Japan as a teenager. By now having lived and taught in Japan for more than 40 years, she is also active in the North American haiku community, Her haiga often feature abstract, layered digital images with haiku or tanka arrayed expressively on floating lines.
Elizabeth Morley served as the Principal of the Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto for 22 years. She is now visiting scholar at Shinwa Women’s University in Kobe, Japan. Her publications may be found in the Journal of the Learning Sciences and the textbook From the Laboratory to the Classroom: Translating the Science of Learning for Teachers (Routledge) among others. Her current research focuses on her belief in the value of environmental awareness in children’s learning and to the institute’s book, Natural Curiosity, Building Children’s Understanding of the World Through Environmental Inquiry (www.naturalcuriosity.ca/).
Note: Unfortunately, Elizabeth cannot attend HNA; her presentation will be read by Makoto Nakanishi.
Katherine J. Munro (kjmunro) originally was from Vancouver, BC, but now lives in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. She is Membership Secretary for Haiku Canada, and is an Associate Member of the League of Canadian Poets. In 2014, she founded “solstice haiku,” a monthly haiku discussion group that she continues to facilitate. She has two leaflets with Leaf Press, and, along with crime fiction writer Jessica Simon, she co-edited Body of Evidence: A Collection of Killer ’Ku, an anthology of crime-related haiku.
Makoto Nakanishi is a professor at Ehime University, Faculty of Education, in Matsuyama, Japan. He has conducted research extensively on haiku education in primary and secondary schools.
Nick Virgilio Haiku Association was founded in 1989 to promote the writing of haiku poetry, to provide encouragement and support to young people to write poetry, and to further the work and poetry of Camden haiku poet Nick Virgilio. The Association is pleased to present the film Remembering Nick Virgilio by Sean Dougherty, and the filmed play Nick of Time … Nick of Time by Joe Paprzycki. Persons involved in the presentation of the play are producer Henry Brann (NVHA); director and video editing John Doyle (Iron Age Theater); actors Bob Weick (Nick Virgilio), Rocky Wilson (Walt Whitman), Ned Pryce (Nightline production assistant and Nick’s brother, Larry Virgilio); director of videography and video editing John Doyle; videographers Marc Brodzik and Andrew Geller (Woodshop Films); sound engineer Andrew Geller; fundraising, publicity, and on-site buzz management Robin Palley and Donna Beaver; and instigator-in-chief Al Pizzarelli.
Tom Painting, in addition to writing haiku, is an avid birdwatcher, hiker, and traveler. He teaches literature and creative writing at the Paideia School in Atlanta, GA.
Linda M. Papanicolaou is an art historian and art teacher in the Bay Area of California. She is a member of the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, Haiku Poets of Northern California, and the Haiku Society of America. For the past 11 years she has edited Haigaonline.
Jacquie Pearce has written ten novels for children and a collection of short stories for young adults, as well as nonfiction prose and poetry. Her haiku have been featured in a variety of journals and anthologies. Jacquie is coeditor with Angela Naccarato of The Jade Pond, a haiku collection inspired by Vancouver’s Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden.
Alan Pizzarelli has been writing haiku, senyru, and related forms for more than four decades. Pizzarelli studied under the tutelage of Prof. Harold G. Henderson in New York City and has published 13 collections of poetry, including his latest book, Frozen Socks: New and Selected Short Poems (House of Haiku, 2015). His work has been widely anthologized in major journals and books. He is co-producer and cohost of the podcast, Haiku Chronicles.
Claudia Coutu Radmore has been writing lyric and Japanese forms since the early 1990s. She is the past president of KaDo, the Ottawa haiku group, and is the Haiku Canada members’ representative for Ontario. Her most recent haiku collection is the business of isness (2017). Your Hands Discover Me/ Tes mains me découvrent (2010), is a collection of bilingual tanka. With Marco Fraticelli she coedited The Touch of a Moth (2013), the Haiku Canada 35th-year anthology, and the two are busy coediting Wordless, this year’s 40th anniversary members’ anthology. Claudia created Catkin Press in 2013 and has published collections by Marco Fraticelli, Philomene Kocher, Hans Jongman, Anna Vakar, kjmunro and Jessica Simon, and Grant Savage, as well as the haibun memoirs of Hans Jongman and Guy Simser.
Preethi Ramaprasad has been studying the bharatanatyam style of classical Indian dance with Prof. Sudharani Raghupathy for the past 22 years. Born and raised in the United States, she has made annual visits to India to train with her guru. From 2011 to 2012 she taught school in New York City with the Teach for America organization and now pursues bharatanatyam professionally. She lives in San Francisco.
Kala Ramesh’s love for haiku and her initiatives culminated in the formation of “IN Haiku” in 2013 — to get Indian haiku poets under one umbrella to promote, enjoy, and sink deeper into the beauty and intricacies of haiku and allied Japanese short forms of poetry. In collaboration with artists, musicians, and dancers, she has had several readings in public places. She is editor-in-chief of Naad Anunaad: an Anthology of Contemporary World Haiku.
Cristina Rascón-Castro is a Mexican writer and translator of Japanese poetry into Spanish. She has produced collections by contemporary poets Shuntarō Tanikawa, Keijiro Suga, and Seino Chisato as well as a trilingual (Japanese, Spanish, Nahuatl) book of haiku by Chiyo-ni. Cristina’s own books of haiku in Spanish, include one for children, Zoológico de palabritas (Andraval/Japan Foundation). She has received creative writing and translating scholarships, attended artistic residences in five countries and published haiku, poetry, essays, and short stories in a dozen languages. She is director of Skribalia: Online Global School for Writers and teaches haiku and creative writing in several institutions. Find Cristina on the Web at www.http://cristinarascon.com.mx/en and www.skribalia.com.
Ce Rosenow’s research explores the relationship between American poetry and Japan. Related articles have appeared in Literary Imagination, Papers on Language and Literature, and Philological Quarterly. She coedited with Bob Arnold The Next One Thousand Years: The Selected Poems of Cid Corman. She is the former president of the Haiku Society of America and the publisher of Mountains and Rivers Press in Eugene, Ore.
Alexis Rotella is an award-winning author who specializes in Japanese poetry forms. She was president of The Haiku Society of America as well as Frogpond editor in 1984. She started a number of journals including Brussels Sprout and Prune Juice. Her work has been included in the major haiku anthologies. She coedited The Ash Moon Anthology, poems on aging (2008, MET Press). Her latest haiku collection is Between Waves (2015, Red Moon Press). Rotella is also a digital artist who exhibits locally, on the Web, and most recently in Italy and Portugal. She is currently the judge for Ito-en Haiku Contest. Rotella practices classical acupuncture and bioresonance technology in Arnold, Md.
Robert Rotella is a patent/copyright attorney, worked in private industry, a prestigious DC law firm, and most recently NASA. Retired, he is cochair of the local score chapter where he counsels people in starting their own businesses. Now and then he writes a haiku.
Lidia Rozmus received a master’s degree in history of art from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and later studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1980 she has made her home in the sovereign Republic of Mole Hill, near Chicago. She works as a graphic designer, paints sumi-e and oils, writes haiku. She shows her work in the U.S., Poland, and Japan. She has written and designed several prizewinning fine art portfolios and books of haiku, haibun, and haiga. Lidia is art editor of Modern Haiku and art director at Deep North Press.
Miriam Sagan--see HNA 2017 Organizing Committee members above.
Meta Schettler is an associate professor in the Africana Studies Program at California State University, Fresno. Her research interests include postcolonialism, African and African American literature, and South African politics and culture. She has papers published in the International Journal of Africana Studies, Obsidian, Valley Voices, Abafazi, BMa: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review, and Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies.
Rich Schnell is a SUNY Distinguished Professor of Counseling at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. He is past Chair of the New York Board for Mental Health Practitioners. Rich is an addictions specialist, a mental health psychotherapist and teacher, and has used haiku, and presented on its use, in the U.S., Bhutan, Canada, and Romania. Rich has taught graduate courses in Zen Therapy and Haiku as Meditation & Healing.
Zoanne Schnell is a Professor Emeritus of Nursing at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, and has worked with Rich Schnell in presenting training programs for health & mental health professionals using haiku and mindfulness in Bhutan and Romania.
Dan Schwerin came to haiku through old issues of American Haiku in a northern Wisconsin library, and he gratefully acknowledges the help given him by many fine Midwestern mentors. His poems reflect the rounds made in a vocation as United Methodist minister in suburban Milwaukee. His first published haiku collection, θRS, received a Touchstone Award for Distinguished Books from the Haiku Foundation in 2015. Schwerin also facilitates the monthly meeting of Haiku Waukesha in Waukesha, Wis.
Henry Shukman (Ryu’un-ken) is an Associate Master of the Sanbo Zen lineage, based in Kamakura, Japan, and is the Guiding Teacher at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe. He has an MA from Cambridge (UK) and an M.Litt from St Andrews University, and is a writer and poet of British-Jewish origin, who has published eight books of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. He writes regularly for Tricycle, The New York Times, and other publications. His most recent book is the poetry collection Archangel.
Karen Sohne has written haiku for a while and renku for a bit less. While Marshall leads the renku, I try to facilitate. If you’ve not done a Marshall-led renku before, don’t be shy, my role is to help you along (explaining and encouraging), while Marshall charts the course of the renku. Hope to see old and new renku friends there.
Carmen Sterba — Carmen Sterba is at home in Washington State or Kamakura, Japan. She has been both the secretary and 1st vice-president of the Haiku Society of America. Her new chapbook, An Amazement of Deer, combines original deer-related photos, haiku, and rengay, plus deer haiku composed by twenty poets.
John Stevenson is a former president of the Haiku Society of America (2000), former editor of Frogpond (2003–2008) and current managing editor of The Heron’s Nest (since 2008).
Jessica Tremblay is a haiku poet and cartoonist. Her Old Pond Comics (www.oldpondcomics.com) have been featured in haiku journals in Canada, France, the U.S., and Japan. She’s been cartoonist-in-residence at Haiku North America, Seabeck Haiku Getaway, Haiku Canada Weekend, and Haiku Hot Springs.
Charles Trumbull--see HNA 2017 Organizing Committee members above.
Cipriano Vigil — A native of the village of Chamisal, N.M., he has devoted his life to the collection, performance, teaching, and preservation of the Hispanic music of New Mexico. Vigil has been honored as a Living Treasure, has received the Governor’s Award, and the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities Award, and has been nominated three times for the National Heritage Award for outstanding work in maintaining and preserving traditional folk music. He crafts many of his own guitars (notably out of cigar boxes!), has taught college courses, and recently published a book about New Mexico folklore. At the HNA Fiesta del Haikú, he is accompanied by his son, Cipriano Pablo Vigil, and daughter, Felicita Vigil Piñón. See more at http://newmexicofolkmusictreasure.com.
Julie Warther facilitates the Ohaio-ku Study Group in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and serves as Midwest Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America. She was instrumental in the creation of the Forest Haiku Walk at the Holmes County Open Air Art Museum in Millersburg, Ohio. Her work was selected to appear in A New Resonance 9 (Red Moon Press, 2015), and she is privileged to serve as an assistant editor for The Living Senryu Anthology.
Michael Dylan Welch--see HNA Board members above.
Don Wentworth is a Pittsburgh-based poet whose work reflects his interest in the revelatory nature of brief, haiku-like moments in everyday life. He is the author of three full-length poetry collections published by Six Gallery Press: Past All Traps (2011), Yield to the Willow (2014), and With a Deepening Presence (2016). Past All Traps was shortlisted for the Haiku Foundation’s 2011 Touchstone Distinguished Books Award.
Scott Wiggerman --see HNA 2017 Organizing Committee members above.
Elizabeth Yahn Williams is an award-winning ekphrastic poet and author/editor of over two dozen books and chapbooks. Her creative arts grants include awards from Ford Foundation through UCLA, LMU, Publishers and Writers of San Diego, Publishing University, Vermont Studio Center, National Audio Theatre, Queen Mary College of the University of London, England, SLS in Montreal, Canada, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts–Auvillar, France. With her Partner-in-Rhyme, Bob Lundy, she has presented national workshops and inaugurated the “Downtown Verse” Program for the San Diego Public Library. Her new HAIKU for an Artist series is written in the form of a parallel reader with the first two books in French and Spanish respectively.
Kathabela Wilson is creator of Poets on Site, with concentrations on haiku and tanka. She prompts and leads haiku and tanka workshops online, in museums and gardens, hosts three poetry meetings a week, and organizes many salons featuring visiting poets. Kathabela was one of Two Autumns readers for Haiku Poets of Northern CA in 2014. She specializes in performance poetry accompanied by Rick’s flutes of the world and publishes in anthologies and journals worldwide.
Rick Wilson is a collector and player of historical flutes since 1980. He recently retired from Caltech as Professor Emeritus of Mathematics. He has expanded his interests and collection since 2001 to include playing flutes of the world, including traditional Japanese, Chinese, Central Asian, Native American, and Eastern European and beyond. Together they travel the world collecting instruments and participating in mathematics conferences.
Ruth Yarrow is an environmental educator, activist, and organizer for peace, justice, and a sustainable planet. She has been writing haiku for over forty years and has had six books of haiku published. She lives in Ithaca, N.Y., near her two children and their families.
Yoko’s Dogs (Jane Munro, Susan Gillis, Mary di Michele, and Jan Conn) is a collaborative group of poets dedicated to writing in Japanese forms. Whisk was published by Pedlar Press (2013) and Rhinoceros by Gaspereau (2016). Visit them at yokosdogs.com.
Karina M. Young, a member of Haiku Poets of Northern California and Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, has been writing and publishing haiku and tanka since 2000. Through the Lupines, a chapbook of her haiku, was a co-winner of The Snapshot Press eChapbook Award 2016 and is forthcoming as an online collection. Eucalyptus Wind, published in 2017 by Red Moon Press, is her first full-length collection of haiku. A longtime educator, she currently freelances and helps run her spouse’s contracting business in Salinas, California.
John Zheng is professor and chair of the Department of English at Mississippi Valley State University. His edited books include The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku, African American Haiku: Cultural Visions, and Conversations with Sterling Plumpp (University Press of Mississippi).
