Keynote Speaker

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  • Dr. Randy Brooks, haiku poet, teacher, archivist, editor and publisher, and Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and Professor of English at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, is the Keynote Speaker for HNA 2015. His keynote address is titled "Teaching Haiku in American Higher Education." 
About the Keynote Address: 
Randy Brooks gives us a glimpse at his presentation:

“Teaching Haiku in American Higher Education” is an examination the points of entry for teaching haiku in American higher education.

As someone who is innately a collector, I have always been drawn to libraries and bibliographical research. In this presentation, I will be providing a brief overview of what you will discover when you look for scholarship on haiku in traditional academic search tools such as JSTOR, EBSCO and the Modern Language Association databases.

Then I will narrow the collector’s eye to focus on approaches to teaching haiku as a literary art in American higher education. In the late 20th Century and 21st Century, haiku has been an important area for academic study through three broad avenues of exploration: (1) as literary histories of haiku poetics, (2) as cultural studies of comparative haiku literature, and (3) as creative haiku writing.

I will conclude with an example of a program of haiku studies at Millikin University, a small comprehensive university, in which students integrate the arts of reading and writing haiku through performance learning to become active members of a contemporary haiku community.
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About Randy Brooks

Dr. Randy Brooks is the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and Professor of English at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois. He teaches courses and workshops on haiku poetry traditions. His students’ haiku and essays are available on the MU Haiku web site.  Millikin University has hosted two haiku conferences: the Midwest Haiku Festival in 1992 and the Global Haiku Festival in 2000. Dr. Brooks also teaches book publishing, serving as faculty advisor for the student-run Bronze Man Books publishing company since 2006.

He and his wife, Shirley Brooks, are co-editors and publishers of Brooks Books, and edit Mayfly haiku magazine. Randy and Shirley have been dedicated to publishing books, magazines and online collections of haiku in English since 1976 when they founded High/Coo Press. In 1990 Randy & Shirley changed the name of the publishing company to Brooks Books. Click here for more information about Brooks Books publishing.

Dr. Brooks serves on the Executive Committee of the Haiku Society of America as the Electronic Media Officer. He serves as the webmaster for Modern Haiku Press and Modern Haiku magazine. He is on the editorial board for the Red Moon Press Haiku Anthologies. He also edits the web sampler issues and back issue archives of Frogpond magazine. He is a member of the editorial team for the new journal of haiku criticism, Juxtapositions.

   Randy has won many awards for his haiku including 1st Place in the Harold G. Henderson Award from the Haiku Society of America. In addition to several chapbooks, a collection of his selected haiku, School's Out, was published in by Press Here (Foster City, California). He is co-editor of the Global Haiku Anthology published by Iron Press (England) and the Midwest Haiku Anthology published by Brooks Books.

Dr. Brooks been actively involved in building various archives of haiku publications and currently serves on the board for the American Haiku Archives in the California State Library in Sacramento. In the 1980s he edited and published four editions of Haiku Review, a bibliography of haiku books in print and current scholarship. To facilitate research on contemporary haiku by his students at Millikin University, he established the Decatur Haiku Collection, with a complete bibliography of all holdings available on the MU Haiku web site. 

As Electronic Media Officer for the Haiku Society of America, he maintains the online collections of the Henderson Memorial Haiku awards, the Brady Memorial Senryu awards, the Einbond Renku awards, the Virgilio Memorial awards, the Museum of Haiku Literature awards, and the HSA Merit Book Awards. As web editor for Modern Haiku Press, he edited and designed He was the editor and designer of a digital archive of the first ten years of Modern Haiku magazine, available on a CD. He is currently working on digital archives of all issues of High/Coo: A Quarterly of Short Poetry, Mayfly magazine, American Haiku magazine, and the second ten years of Modern Haiku.