Deborah P Kolodji, August 11, 1959 – July 21, 2024
Haiku North America is profoundly saddened to announce that its longtime board member and director, Deborah P Kolodji, passed away in her sleep on July 21, 2024 after a prolonged struggle with cancer. Our condolences to her family and many friends around the world. HNA is grateful for her service not just to the organization but for her dedicated passion for haiku and related poetry and love for all poets worldwide who valued haiku. She was also an accomplished poet, and her latest book, Vital Signs (Cuttlefish Books, 2024), chronicled her arduous cancer journey. We will all miss Debbie greatly.
forest stillness
condors return
to the Redwoods
Deborah P Kolodji
forest stillness
condors return
to the Redwoods
Deborah P Kolodji
HNA Directors
Garry Gay
Garry Gay founded the Haiku North America conference in 1991. He was born in Glendale, California, 1951 and received his B.P.A. degree in photography in 1974. He has been a photographer by profession for more than 35 years. He started writing haiku in 1975. Greatly influenced by Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, he has steadily written haiku over the past four decades. He is one of the cofounders of the Haiku Poets of Northern California. He became their first president from 1989–90 and in 2001–2007 again served as president. As president in 1989 he founded the Two Autumns reading series. In 1991 he was elected as president of the Haiku Society of America. In 1996 he also cofounded the American Haiku Archives in Sacramento, California. Garry is the creator of the poetic form called rengay. He is the author of The Billboard Cowboy, The Silent Garden, Wings of Moonlight, River Stones, and Along the Way. He currently lives in the California wine country in the small town of Windsor with his wife Melinda and daughter Alissa.
Agnes Eva Savich
Agnes Eva Savich is Haiku North America’s treasurer. Her work has appeared in major journals since 2004, placed in contests in the United States, Canada, England, and Japan, and been anthologized in several collections. She currently serves as the Haiku Society of America’s Southwest regional coordinator and as a Touchstone Awards panelist; leads the Austin, Texas Haiku Group (founded in 2019), the Pflugerville Poetry Society, and an HSA mentorship program group; served as judge of the 2020 Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational contest and the 2022 HSA Merit Book Awards; edited A Charm of Finches (an HSA Southwest region members’ anthology); helped to lead the 2021 memorial reading for Haiku North America; and presented “Mining Your Past” at the 2022 HSA national virtual conference. She is an administrative program coordinator of Mellon grant fellows at the University of Texas at Austin, where she manages accounting and reporting for over $3M awarded across three grants. She is a performing amateur oboist with the Perpetual Motion Quintet and Red River Ensemble Orchestra. In her free time, she enjoys learning Argentine tango and piano.
Michael Dylan Welch
Michael Dylan Welch helped to found the Haiku North America conference in 1991. He edited the journal Woodnotes from 1989 to 1997, and later served as editor/publisher of Tundra: The Journal of the Short Poem and of Press Here haiku and tanka books. He cofounded the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library in 1996, founded the Tanka Society of America in 2000, and then National Haiku Writing Month in 2010. His haiku, tanka, and longer poetry has been published in hundreds of journals and anthologies in more than twenty languages, and he has won first prize in each of the Henderson, Brady, Drevniok, Tokutomi, and Bacopa contests, among others. Michael lives near Seattle with his wife and two children in Sammamish, Washington and has served two terms as poet laureate of Redmond, Washington, where he also serves as president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword. His personal website is Graceguts, and he also runs the Rengay website.
HNA is a 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation based in California, led by the preceding directors. In addition, a local organizing team takes on the responsibility for running each biennial conference.
Former Directors
Deborah P Kolodji
Deborah P Kolodji served as the California regional coordinator for the Haiku Society of America and moderator of the Southern California Haiku Study Group. The former president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, Kolodji was also a member of the Haiku Poets of Northern California, the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, Haiku Canada, and the California State Poetry Society. Author of four chapbooks of poetry, her first full-length book of haiku and senryu, Highway of Sleeping Towns, from Shabda Press won a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. Debbie published more than 1,200 haiku in publications such as Frogpond, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, Bottle Rockets, A Hundred Gourds, Acorn, Rattle, and Mayfly, as well as speculative poetry in Strange Horizons, Star*Line, Grievous Angel, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Tales of the Unanticipated, Tales of the Talisman, and Dreams and Nightmares. She also published short stories in Thema and Tales of the Talisman and a short memoir in Chicken Soup for the Dieter’s Soul. Her work has been anthologized in such publications as The Rhysling Anthology, Red Moon Anthology, Dwarf Stars, Aftershocks: Poetry of Recovery, New Resonance 4, and The Nebula Awards Showcase: 2015. Debbie co-organized the 2013 HNA conference aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, and joined HNA as a director in 2016. Debbie passed away in July of 2024.
Deborah P Kolodji served as the California regional coordinator for the Haiku Society of America and moderator of the Southern California Haiku Study Group. The former president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, Kolodji was also a member of the Haiku Poets of Northern California, the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, Haiku Canada, and the California State Poetry Society. Author of four chapbooks of poetry, her first full-length book of haiku and senryu, Highway of Sleeping Towns, from Shabda Press won a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. Debbie published more than 1,200 haiku in publications such as Frogpond, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, Bottle Rockets, A Hundred Gourds, Acorn, Rattle, and Mayfly, as well as speculative poetry in Strange Horizons, Star*Line, Grievous Angel, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Tales of the Unanticipated, Tales of the Talisman, and Dreams and Nightmares. She also published short stories in Thema and Tales of the Talisman and a short memoir in Chicken Soup for the Dieter’s Soul. Her work has been anthologized in such publications as The Rhysling Anthology, Red Moon Anthology, Dwarf Stars, Aftershocks: Poetry of Recovery, New Resonance 4, and The Nebula Awards Showcase: 2015. Debbie co-organized the 2013 HNA conference aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, and joined HNA as a director in 2016. Debbie passed away in July of 2024.
Paul Miller
Paul Miller served as treasurer for Haiku North America until the end of 2023. He oversaw our legal formation on August 24, 2004, and our application for nonprofit status, which was approved on May 27, 2005. Paul’s poetry and essays have been published internationally. His first book Finding the Way won the 2003 Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award. His most recent collection, Called Home, is available from Red Moon Press. He worked as a controller of a national brokerage, served as treasurer of the Haiku Society of America for more than a decade, and continues to serve as treasurer of the Haiku Poets of Northern California. He also been editor of Modern Haiku magazine since 2013.
Paul Miller served as treasurer for Haiku North America until the end of 2023. He oversaw our legal formation on August 24, 2004, and our application for nonprofit status, which was approved on May 27, 2005. Paul’s poetry and essays have been published internationally. His first book Finding the Way won the 2003 Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award. His most recent collection, Called Home, is available from Red Moon Press. He worked as a controller of a national brokerage, served as treasurer of the Haiku Society of America for more than a decade, and continues to serve as treasurer of the Haiku Poets of Northern California. He also been editor of Modern Haiku magazine since 2013.
Paul Miller, Garry Gay, and Michael Dylan Welch, HNA directors, August 4, 2011, Seattle Gum Wall.
Michael Dylan Welch, Debbie Kolodji, Garry Gay, and Paul Miller, HNA directors, September 16, 2017, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
