* ARCHIVE * Presenters at Haiku North America 2007 * ARCHIVE *
Updated: September 3, 2012
Here are most of the presenters for Haiku North America 2007, in alphabetical order. We will provide more details as we finalize them.
John Barlow is the editor of the Haiku Calendar, which has appeared annually since 2000, and co-editor of The New Haiku (Snapshot Press, 2002), and Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (Snapshot Press, 2007). He edited the haiku magazine Snapshots from 1998–2006, and Tangled Hair, the first journal dedicated solely to English-language tanka to be published outside the US, from 1999–2006. His own haiku and tanka have received awards in the UK, US, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, and are widely published in magazines and anthologies. His collections include Waiting for the Seventh Wave (haiku), and Snow About To Fall (tanka), both from Snapshot Press (2006). He lives and works in the North West of England, a short walk from the sea. John organized Across The Pond: Transatlantic Haiku, and he is a co-presenter of Wing Beats: British and North American Birds in Haiku.
Roberta Beary grew up in New York City and now lives near Washington, DC. In the early 1990s she lived in Tokyo for 5 years, where she began to study and write haiku. She has since won numerous international haiku awards, including 1st prize in the Haiku International, Kusamakura, Penumbra, Tokutomi and Brady contests. In 2006 Roberta and Ellen Compton edited fish in love, the Haiku Society of America's Members' Anthology, and she is currently on the editorial staff of The Red Moon Anthology. A member of the Towpath Haiku Group, her own haiku appear in A New Resonance 2: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku (Red Moon Press, 2001), and in her collection The Unworn Necklace (Snapshot Press, 2007 ) which won 1st prize in the 2006 Snapshot Press Haiku Collection Competition. Roberta is a featured reader in Across The Pond: Transatlantic Haiku and is a co-presenter of Season Words for Places Where We Live and the Memorial Haiku Reading at the HNA banquet.
Janick Belleau was born in Montreal. Graduated from Ottawa University. Lived seven years in Winnipeg. Back to Montreal since 1987. Published a sociocultural essay, "Le Manitoba des femmes répond – questionnaire Gabrielle Roy"; a poetry collection, L’En-dehors du désir and a haiku & tanka collection, Humeur… / Sensibility… / Alma… in three languages. She coauthored a most recent book, an erotic haiku anthology containing 182 haiku from 77 poets from French Canada, France and Belgium, L’Erotique poème court / haiku. Her short stories and her feature articles appear in feminist and literary journals in French-speaking countries. She is a member of Haiku Canada. Janick will present Women Pioneers in Canadian Haiku: 1928-1985.
Tara Betts is a graduate of the New England College MFA Program in Poetry and Cave Canem. Tara’s haiku have appeared in Erotic Haiku, Taboo Haiku, Fingernails Across a Chalkboard and Valley Voices. Her work has also been published in Callaloo, Essence and Obsidian III. She lives, teaches and performs in New York City. For more information, you can visit her website www.tarabetts.net. Tara will lead the panel African Americans Writing Haiku.
Randy Brooks, Ph.D, directs the writing major and serves as Dean of Teaching & Learning at Millikin University, a private university in Decatur, Illinois, where he teaches courses on publishing and the global haiku tradition. He and his wife, Shirley Brooks, have been co-editors and publishers of Brooks Books, (formerly High/Coo Press) and currently are editors of Mayfly magazine. Brooks is also web editor for Modern Haiku magazine and Electronic Media Officer for the Haiku Society of America. Randy has won many awards for his haiku and haiku publishing including 1st Place in the Harold G. Henderson Award from the Haiku Society of America. A collection of his selected haiku, School's Out, was published in 1999 by Press Here (Foster City, California). Randy will present Haiku Personae of Raymond Roseliep.
Derrick Weston Brown holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. He has studied poetry under Dr. Tony Medina at Howard University and Cornelius Eady at American University. He is a former Lannan Fellow and a graduate of the Cave Canem Writers Retreat. His work has appeared in such literary journals as Warpland and DrumVoices, and the online journals Beltway Poetry Quarterly and Howard University’s Amistad. His work has also appeared in The Washington Post and New Orleans Times-Picayune newpapers and the anthologies, When Words Become Flesh ( Mwaza Publications), Taboo Haiku (Avisson Press), and Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University Of Michigan Press). In 2006 he released his first chapbook of poetry entitled The Unscene and is currently working on his second chapbook/manuscript tentatively entitled Watershed. He is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, and currently resides in Mount Rainier, Maryland. He is the Poet-In-Residence at Busboys and Poets bookstore and restaurant.
L. Teresa Church, a member of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective, is a playwright, freelance writer, arts consultant, quiltmaker, poet and library professional. She was born and raised in rural Virginia and presently resides in Durham, North Carolina. Church is the author of numerous poems, several articles, and other writings. She has presented quilt-talks at venues such as public libraries, local schools, and the women’s prison. Her quilt collection has been featured in exhibits at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina and St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Teresa is a co-presenter of African American Quilts and the Women Who Make Them.
Ellen Compton is a freelance writer and is one of the founding members of Towpath, a haiku group with poets in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington D.C. Ellen's haiku won first prize in the 2006 Harold G. Henderson competition that is sponsored by the Haiku Society of America. She is a former editor of the Red Moon Anthology. With Roberta Beary, she was co-editor of fish in love, the 2006 membership anthology for the Haiku Society of America. Currently Ellen is Regional Coordinator for the HSA Mid-Atlantic Region. See also Ellen's profile on the Milliken University Haiku Writer Profile site. Ellen is a co-presenter of Season Words for Places Where We Live.
Carlos Colón is a practicing haiku and renku poet and a long-time member of the Haiku Society of America. He has published two chapbooks of haiku as well as Circling Bats: A Concrete Renga with Raffael de Gruttola and Sassy: A Collection of Linked Poems with Alexis Rotella. In addition, he has edited the 2001 HSA members’ anthology, which was awarded an Honorable Mention in the HSA Merit Book Awards. Carlos is a co-presenter of Concrete Renku: Linking Words and Images.
Jerome J. Cushman is a retired educator with over 40 years of experience primarily in areas of theatre and performance. The past 30 years have been at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, New York. In 2000 he originated and coordinated the Robert F. Panara Haiku Contests for deaf students at NTID and its sister institution, Tsukuba College of Technology in Japan. Because of the success of this contest he has visited Japan 5 times to study and share in the Japanese haiku experience. Cushman has had 3 articles published in Frogpond. In 2004 he helped to reestablish the Rochester Area Haiku Group which has a membership base of 28 and has monthly meetings with the average of 10 people attending. Jerome will be a co-presenter of the Memorial Haiku Reading at the HNA banquet.
Photographer Alan Dehmer creates evocative images using a process called gum bichromate, a cross between photography and painting first developed in 1855. He uses natural pigments taken from the earth (Italian and German soils are favorites) or organic pigments from things local, like walnut and camellia hulls, or imported from afar, such as sandalwood, indigo and henna. His images capture moments of quiet beauty that express the truth embedded in all things: that impermanence is a constant condition in life, and that memory, which holds the images that pass, provides a steadiness and a place that we return to. See his Web site, Alan Dehmer, Woods Edge Photography (http://www.woodsedge.net). Alan is part of Vision/Voice: Exploring Connections Between Art and Haiku, an art exhibit and panel discussion.
Efren Estevez is from Havana, Cuba where he was born in 1958; he immigrated to this country in 1962. He makes his living as a trader of bulk food commodities. In addition to his interest in haiku, Estevez is a writer of short stories and non-fiction. He has written four technical computer books for McGraw-Hill and Prentice Hall. A debilitating injury in 1999 which kept him bedridden for three years prompted him for a time to become a full time writer. His serious interest in haiku arose in this period and since then his poems, essays, and criticism have been regularly been published in Modern Haiku, Frogpond and bottle rockets. Most recently, Estevez served as coordinator for the Northeast Metro region of the Haiku Society of America from 2003 to 2006. Along with family, extensive travels in Asia, South America and Europe provide the inspiration for much of his work. He currently lives on the north shore of Long Island, New York. Efren will present The Nature Tradition in English Language Haiku—a Bridge or a Bind?
Printmaker Steven Fishman creates abstract images that are the result of search, improvisation, and poetic curiosity. In his search to find truth in a non verbal process, he uses large areas and intervals of open positive space as textural elements and commentary on the fragmentary nature of perception. Etching shaped, cut mosaic-like plates and manipulating them on the press presents fascinating visual language opportunities and a musical lens with which to explore the spiritual nature of creativity and humanity. In his prints he seeks a balanced moment where interval, idea, and object are one. Steven is part of Vision/Voice: Exploring Connections Between Art and Haiku, an art exhibit and panel discussion.
Donna Foulke is an Alaska Native artist originally from Juneau, Alaska now living in Northern Virginia. As well as writing, she is a photographer, collage artist, filmmaker, and illustrator, and works for the U.S. Geological Survey as a graphic artist and Web designer. In 2000, she was awarded the Alaska Native Writer's Award for Literature from the University of Alaska for her poetry. Donna has been a guest speaker on Native Science and has performed poetry readings and traditional storytelling. Her latest performance was a poetry presentation "Visual Poetry on Film and Paper" at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Washington, DC, November 2006. The program was a part of the NMAI's Listening to our Ancestors Cultural Festival. Donna will present A Walk on the Path of Our Ancestors: American Indian and Alaska Native Interpretations of the Japanese Haiku.
Stanford M. Forrester is a past president of the Haiku Society of America, and he is the editor of bottle rockets: a collection of short verse. Some of his haiku have been published in Haiku published by Knopf in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poetry Series and American Zen: A Gathering of Poets by Bottom Dog Press. Stanford will be on the panel The Third R: The Role of Research in Haiku.
Garry Gay founded the Haiku North America conference in 1991. See his bio on the HNA Officers page. Garry will present a Rengay Talk and Workshop.
Richard Gilbert, Ph.D, entered Naropa University in 1981, where he studied with Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, and Gary Snyder. Japanese haiku became a focus, under the tutelage of Patricia Donegan. Richard completed his bachelor’s degree in Poetics and Expressive Arts in 1982, followed by a master’s in Contemplative Psychology, 1986. Richard earned a Ph.D. in Poetics and Depth Psychology at the Union Institute and University, 1990. In 1997, Richard moved to Japan to pursue Japanese haiku research. He is currently Associate Professor, Department of British and American Language and Literature, at Kumamoto University. His interviews with gendai haijin (contemporary-haiku poets), now living in Japan are collected on the new Web site Gendai Haiku. In 2006, Richard was awarded a two year grant from MEXT (the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) for research on modern Japanese Haiku. MEXT is gratefully acknowledged here for sponsoring the research provided in this talk, and for allowing HNA conference participation. Richard will present Did the Frog Jump Into the Old Pond?
Ferris Gilli is an Associate Editor of the haiku journal The Heron's Nest. An experienced international haiku competition adjudicator, she also developed a haiku study-and-exercise guide, Exploring Haiku, for the Romanian Educational System. Her own work in haiku and related forms has won numerous awards, and her haiku, tanka, haibun, rengay, renku, and sijo have appeared in prestigious journals in North America, Great Britain, and Europe. Her haiku collection, Shaped by the Wind, was published by Snapshot Press in 2006. Ferris is one of the poets who will provide One-on-One Haiku Consulting Sessions for Beginners, and she is a featured reader in Across The Pond: Transatlantic Haiku.
Raffael de Gruttola is founder of the Boston Haiku Society and Past President and Treasurer of the Haiku Society of America. He was the first Northeast Regional Coordinator of HSA and a practicing haiku, tanka and renku poet. He has collaborated with both Wilfred Croteau and Peggy McClure for haiga. The online journal, Reeds: Contemporary Haiga, recently featured a collection of haiga by de Gruttola and Croteau: Echoes in Sand. At HNA 2007, De Gruttola has an art exhibit (Haiga by Raffael de Gruttola) and is a co-presenter of Concrete Renku: Linking Words and Images.
Carolyn Hall lives in San Francisco where she serves as Membership Secretary for the Haiku Poets of Northern California. She was formerly an editor of Mariposa and has served as a member of the Red Moon Anthology Editorial Staff. Her haiku have been widely published in both US and international journals. Her awards include first place in both the 2005 and 2006 Robert Spiess Memorial Award Haiku Competition, Poem and Poet of the Year in The Heron’s Nest Readers’ Choice Awards for 2005, as well as top recognition from the Harold G. Henderson Award, the San Francisco International Haiku Contest, and The Haiku Calendar Competition, among others. Her work has been featured in Floating Dreams (Two Autumns Press, 2000) and A New Resonance 2: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku (Red Moon Press, 2001). Water Lines (Snapshot Press, 2006) is her first individual collection. Carolyn is one of the poets who will provide One-on-One Haiku Consulting Sessions for Beginners, and she is a featured reader in Across The Pond: Transatlantic Haiku.
Penny Harter's most recent poetry collections are Along River Road, Buried in the Sky, and Lizard Light: Poems From the Earth. A new collection, The Night Marsh, is forthcoming in January of 2008. Her longer poems appear in anthologies and journals worldwide, and in Contemporary Authors. Her haiku appear in The Haiku Anthology (Norton, 1999), Global Haiku (Mosaic Press, 2000) and The Unswept Path: Contemporary American Haiku (White Pine Press, 2005) . She has published five haiku collections, and Stages and Views, poems written to the wood-block prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai with an introduction by Makoto Ueda, also features a number of haiku. She has won fellowships and awards from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Dodge Foundation, and the Poetry Society of America, and the William O. Douglas Nature Writing Award. She is a poet-in-residence for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. More information is available on her web site: http://penhart.home.att.net. Penny will present Stories from Haiku, Haiku from Stories, and she is co-leader of the Gibbous Moon Renku Session.
Marilyn Hazelton has taught haiku and other forms of poetry in elementary, middle and high schools in Pennsylvania, as well as classes for college students, mentally ill men and women, women transitioning from prison, adjudicated youth, and senior citizens. Registered as a poet with the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, her work includes residencies in France, Japan and Morocco. Hazelton will present Entering the Conversation / A Bridge Between Haiku and Art.
Thomas Heffernan, Ph.D, was a founding editor of the Okinawan haiku magazine Plover/Chidori. He received the 2006 Kusamakura Grand Prize for international haiku and since 1985 Mainichi and other awards for haiku in English. Heffernan's haiku chapbook White Edge, Curling Wave and Christmas Gifts in South Japan, haibun/haiku essays, appeared in 2002 and 2003. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship in Poetry and Fiction awarded through The Southern Arts Federation. After teaching in Japan for a number of years, Tom has served since 2005 as Visiting Professor at St Andrews Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, NC. Tom is a co-presenter of Season Words for Places Where We Live.
Cor van den Heuvel is the editor of The Haiku Anthology (3d Edition, Norton, 1999), still the most highly respected collection of American and Canadian haiku and senryu. His most recent book is Baseball Haiku: American and Japanese Haiku and Senryu on the Game, edited by Cor van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura (Norton, 2007). A past president of The Haiku Society of America, van den Heuvel has spoken about haiku at Japan Society, on CBS television, the Writer’s Voice at the West Side Y, and at haiku conferences in the US and Japan. In 2002 in Matsuyama he was awarded the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Prize for his contributions as a poet and editor to international haiku. Van den Heuvel will present Baseball Haiku.
William J. Higginson, “Bill” to friends, has been a driving force in North American and world haiku since the publication of his first translations from the Japanese in 1968. In the 1970s, he edited Haiku Magazine and started his own press, putting out books by Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Searle Lamb, Japanese haiku masters, and others. His Haiku Handbook (1985, still in print) became the standard work in the field (Booklist), and his 1996 books The Haiku Seasons and Haiku World were landmarks in global haiku. He has also published collections of poems on city and country life. A new e-book, Butterfly Dreams, pairs his translations of classic Japanese haiku with nature photographs by Michael Lustbader. And a collection of his longer poems, Surfing on Magma, is in press. He recently led renku workshops at Haiku North America 2005 in Port Townsend, Washington, and in Quebec City, Canada. Bill is a co-presenter of Butterfly Dreams: The Seasons through Haiku and Photographs, and he is co-leader of the Gibbous Moon Renku Session.
Japanese Embroiderers of North Carolina number over 30 individuals who study under sensei Carl Newman, of Winston-Salem. Carl received his teaching certification in the Kurenai-Kai school of embroidery from the Japanese Embroidery Center in Atlanta, headquarters of Japanese Embroidery in America. Embroiderers at all levels study together and new students are continually welcomed. Full day classes, held on weekends, provide opportunities for paced individual and small group learning, shared experiences, and lunch-time educational videos about various cultural aspects of Japan. Embroiderers also attend classes in Atlanta at the Japanese Embroidery Center. Much more information on this art form can be found at the website of the Japanese Embroidery Center http://japaneseembroidery.com. A schedule of classes in Durham and Rocky Mount is available at http://www.nuido.org/classes.html. At the Haiku North America conference, the group will exhibit and demonstrate Japanese Embroidery.
Jim Kacian is the founder of Red Moon Press, author of a dozen books and is the erstwhile editor of Frogpond. Jim will give a talk entitled The Haiku Hierarchy, which will be the keynote address at the opening session. Jim and Bruce Ross will co-lead one of the Anonymous Haiku Workshops.
Joseph Kirschner, Ph.D, came of age in New Orleans, a sensual city of piquant food, soulful blues, and intense nature. He took a first degree from Tulane. After “serving time” as an engineer, he devoted himself to public education. Following a stint in New Jersey public schools, he earned a doctorate from Rutgers. He then taught at universities in Alabama, Kansas, and Ohio—a teacher of teachers. He now lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he writes haiku poetry, studies Jungian psychology, and plays viola, and sometimes violin, in string quartets. He has written three books on haiku. Joe will present A Haiku Bridge from the Unconscious: Using Dreams in Haibun.
Anita Krumins has presented at three HNA conferences and emceed an open reading at another. She has published three children’s books and one collection of haiku. For more information, go to her page at the site of The Writers’ Union of Canada, http://www.writersunion.ca/k/krumins.htm. Krumins is a professor in the Department of Professional Communication at Ryerson University in Toronto. Krumins is a co-presenter of Bridges to the Afterlife: Death Haiku—Alive and Well.
David G. Lanoue is a professor of English at Xavier University in New Orleans and a translator of Japanese haiku. His website, The Haiku of Kobayashi Issa presents over 7,000 of Issa's haiku in English translation with commentary. His first book, Issa: Cup-of-Tea Poems, came out in 1991. He has since published two "haiku novels": Haiku Guy and Laughing Buddha (Red Moon Press 2000 and 2004), and a critical book, Pure Land Haiku: The Art of Priest Issa (Buddhist Books International, 2004). The Bulgarian translation of Haiku Guy appeared earlier this year. He will participate on the panel The Third R: The Role of Research in Haiku.
Over the past 30 years, Michael Lustbader’s images of the natural world have been published by National Geographic Publications, Audubon, Sierra Club, Eastman Kodak, Oxford Scientific Films, and literally hundreds of other book, calendar, and paper product companies, world-wide. His stock photography is represented by Photo Researchers in New York City and The Image Finders in Cleveland, Ohio. (See his photo archive. ) MIchael is a member of the BioCommunications Association, the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, the American Physician’s Art Association, and a charter member of the North American Nature Photography Association. A Cibachrome/Ilfochrome printer for over 25 years, he is currently exploring the world of digital imaging and printing, studying at The Rochester Institute of Technology and Pittsburgh Filmmakers. Michael has co-authored Close-up Photography—Capturing Nature’s Intimate Landscapes and How to Photograph Close-ups in Nature. He has just completed Butterfly Dreams—The Seasons through Haiku and Photographs, a compilation of his images with original translations of traditional Japanese haiku by William J. Higginson. Michael is a co-presenter of Butterfly Dreams: The Seasons through Haiku and Photographs.
Kate MacQueen has been writing haiku and related forms for ten years. Her work has been published in The Heron’s Nest, Acorn, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, and Contemporary Haibun & Haiga among others. Since moving to Chapel Hill, NC in 2001 she has been exploring the prolific and diverse local art scene—an almost overwhelming goal with over a hundred studios within just an hour’s drive of her home. Kate organized Vision/Voice: Exploring Connections Between Art and Haiku, an art exhibit and panel discussion.This event grows out her interest in stimulating novel approaches to creating haiga by bridging the aesthetic sensibilities of contemporary American haiku and art.
A.C. Missias is the editor of Acorn and past co-editor of the Red Moon Anthology. Over the last decade she has placed in a few haiku competitions (and judged a couple of others), led a few workshops, and written a few articles, although politics and other involvements are increasingly competing for her attentions. A.C and Charles Trumbull will co-lead one of the Anonymous Haiku Workshops.
Lenard D. Moore is Executive Chairman of the North Carolina Haiku Society; founder of the Carolina African American Writers' Collective (CAAWC), and winner of a Sam Ragan Fine Arts Award for his contribution to the fine arts of North Carolina. He teaches English, creative writing, and journalism at Mount Olive College. Moore has been writing and publishing haiku for 25 years. His haiku and other poetry have appeared in more than 40 anthologies, including The Haiku Anthology (Norton, 1999). Lenard is a three-time recipient of the Haiku Museum of Tokyo Award (2003, 1994 and 1983). He won the Poet of the Year Award given by The Heron's Nest, for haiku written in 2004. Moore is a co-presenter in An Evening with Sonia Sanchez, African Americans Writing Haiku, and African American Quilts and the Women Who Make Them. He is also co-editor (with Michael Dylan Welch) of the HNA 2007 conference anthology, and he is organizing and leading the Regional Readings.
Carl Newman graduated from Kurenai Kai, Japanese Embroidery Center in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1995 and has taught Japanese Embroidery since then in North Carolina, Oklahoma and Texas. He continues to study with Master shuji Tamura at the Japanese Embroidery Center. In 1985, Carl was chosen by the National Trust for Historical Preservation as one of eight artists celebrated at American Artisans Week in Washington DC. He lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he maintains a studio, Lasting Impressions. Carl leads the Japanese Embroiderers of North Carolina and is a co-presenter of the Japanese Embriodery exhibit.
Lynnette Young Overby, Ph.D., is Full Professor and Director of the Program for Interdisciplinary Learning through the Arts in the Department of Theatre at Michigan State University. Her publications have appeared in the Journal of Mental Imagery; the Journal of Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance; Cognition, Imagination and Personality; and the Journal of Human Movement Studies. With co-authors Beth Post and Diane Newman, Lynnette recently published the book, Interdisciplinary Learning through Dance: 101 Moventures. She serves as co-editor of Dance: Current Selected Research with Billie Lepczyk. Her research interests are in the area of mental imagery, arts education and interdisciplinary learning. In 1996, she received a Teacher Scholar Award from Michigan State University. In 2000 she was named the National Dance Association Scholar/Artist and in October 2004 she received the Leadership Award from the National Dance Education Organization. Overby is a co-presenter of Spanning Haiku and Modern Dance: A Moving/Words Writing/Moves Workshop.
Matthew Paul was born in 1966 and lives and works in London. A regular contributor of haiku to journals in the UK and the USA for many years, his first collection, The Regulars, was recently published by Snapshot Press. Paul is a member of the committee of the British Haiku Society, administers the Society’s annual haibun anthology, and is reviews editor for Presence haiku magazine. With John Barlow, he is co-editor and co-writer of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (Snapshot Press, 2007), an anthology which reflects his love of the natural world and avian life in particular. Paul is a co-presenter of Wing Beats: British and North American Birds in Haiku, and he is a featured reader in Across The Pond: Transatlantic Haiku.
Alan Pizzarelli was born in 1950 of an Italian-American family in Newark, New Jersey. Raised in the first ward’s Little Italy, he was noted for his many artistic talents. By the age of 14, he formed his own band and performed as lead singer, bass guitarist and song writer. In the late 1960s, he befriended the poet/punster Louis Ginsberg (father of Allen Ginsberg) who taught him the fundamentals of writing poetry. In the early 1970s, he studied haiku and related forms under the tutelage of Professor Harold G. Henderson, author of An Introduction to Haiku (Doubleday) and Haiku in English (Charles Tuttle). Since then, Pizzarelli’s astonishing output of authentic English language haiku and senryu have received world-wide acclaim and popularity. He has been much publicized as a pioneer of English-language senryu and a leading literary spokesmen for the American haiku and senryu movement. Pizzarelli has published 12 collections of his haiku and senryu including The Flea Circus (Islet Books, 1989), City Beat (Islet Books, 1991), which won the Merit Book Award’s first place in 1992, Senryu Magazine (River Willow, 2001), The Windswept Corner (Bottle Rockets Press, 2005). His work has been widely anthologized in many major publications, including in each of the three editions of The Haiku Anthology, edited by Cor van den Heuvel (1974, 1986, 1999), the third edition including 43 of his haiku and senryu. He was also a consultant for Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus (Penguin Poets, 2003) edited by Regina Weinreich. He is currently the Senryu editor of Simply Haiku Magazine and is in the process of editing the first major English-language Senryu Anthology. Pizzarelli will give a talk about Senryu, and he is a co-presenter of Baseball Haiku.
Michele Root-Bernstein, Ph.D., independent scholar and apprentice haiku poet, studies creative imagination across the arts and sciences, with particular attention to the thinking skills common to all disciplines. She is co-author with Robert Root-Bernstein of Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). Her current research focuses on the invention of imaginary worlds in childhood and maturity. Her publications also include personal essays and haiku, these last appearing in recent years in The Heron’s Nest, South by Southeast, Acorn, Haiku Canada, and Geppo. Michele received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. At present she is an adjunct faculty member at Michigan State University. Michele is a co-presenter of Spanning Haiku and Modern Dance: A Moving/Words Writing/Moves Workshop. This trans-disciplinary haiku/dance workshop, presented with Lynnette Overby to teachers and students of all ages, was developed in association with the John F. Kennedy Center and its Partners in Education Program.
Bruce Ross, Ph.D, is editor of Haiku Moment, An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku (Tuttle, 1993), Journey to the Interior, American Versions of Haibun (Tuttle, 1998), and co-editor of the annual Contemporary Haibun (Red Moon Press). Bruce will present Bridging the Link: A Haibun Workshop with Bruce Ross. Bruce and Jim Kacian will co-lead one of the Anonymous Haiku Workshops.
Philip Rowland is a British national who has lived in Tokyo since 1996. He teaches at Tamagawa and Hitotsubashi Universities. Since 2004, he has edited and published NOON: journal of the short poem, and his own collection of that year was given the Haiku Society of America's Kanterman Award. Phillip will present From Haiku to the Short Poem: Bridging the Divide. Note: Haiku poets, please click this link: Questions from Mr. Rowland.
Lidia Rozmus was born in Poland. She studied at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, earning a master's degree in the history of art. Living in United States since 1980, she works as a graphic designer, paints sumi-e and oils and writes haiku. Her paintings and haiku have been exhibited and published in the U.S., Japan and Poland. She has written and designed three portfolios/books of haiku, haibun and haiga: Twenty views from Mole Hill (1999), My Journey (2004) and Hailstones: Haiku by Taneda Santoka (2006) (collective publication). At HNA 2007, Lidia has an exhibition of her haiga that is entitled Hailstones and more... haiga and sumi-e by Lidia Rozmus.
New Orleans editor, writer, filmmaker and teacher Kalamu ya Salaam is founder of the Neo-Griot Workshop, a Black writers workshop focusing on text, recordings and videos; director of Listen to the People, New Orleans oral history project; moderator of e-Drum, a listserv for Black writers; and co-moderator, with his son Mtume, of Breath of Life, a Black music website. Salaam is also the digital video instructor and the co-director of Students at the Center, a writing-based program in the New Orleans public school system. His latest book is the anthology 360-degrees A Revolution of Black Poets (Black Words Press). Salaam's latest spoken word cd is My Story, My Song. His latest movie is Baby Love (75-minute drama). Salaam can be reached at kalamu@aol.com and his website is www.kalamu.com. Translated into six languages, Salaam's haiku have been published internationally in anthologies (e.g. Erotique Noir - Black Erotica and Halala Madiba - Nelson Mandela in Poetry) and a variety of publications (e.g. Essence magazine and African Voices). He is a contributor and subject of an author's profile in the Oxford Companion to African American Literature. His article in the Oxford Companion, Black Arts Movement, provides insight into a movement that has had a great influence on many poets, including some haiku poets. Salaam will be on the panel African Americans Writing Haiku.
Sonia Sanchez is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, including Homegirls & Handgrenades (1984), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Among the many honors she has received are the Community Service Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the Lucretia Mott Award, the Outstanding Arts Award from the Pennsylvania Coalition of 100 Black Women, the Peace and Freedom Award from Women International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the Pennsylvania Governor's Award for Excellence in the Humanities, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. In 2001, Sanchez received the Robert Frost medal in poetry, one of the highest honors awarded to a nationally recognized poet. She has lectured at more than five hundred universities and colleges in the United States and had traveled extensively, reading her poetry in Africa, Cuba, England, the Caribbean, Australia, Nicaragua, the People’s Republic of China, Norway, and Canada. She was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University, where she began teaching in 1977, and held the Laura Carnell Chair in English there until her retirement in 1999. Sanchez will present An Evening with Sonia Sanchez.
George Swede has given a presentation at every HNA conference but one, which he could not attend. His latest collection First Light, First Shadows won 1st Prize in The Snapshot Press Tanka Collection Competition 2005 and was published in October, 2006. For descriptions of his writing philosophy, publishing and performance histories, go to his web site at http://home.primus.ca/~swede. Swede is a Professor Emeritus at Ryerson University in Toronto. He and his wife, the educator and writer Anita Krumins, currently divide their time between Toronto and Mexico. George is a co-presenter of Bridges to the Afterlife: Death Haiku—Alive and Well, and he is a featured reader in Across The Pond: Transatlantic Haiku.
Charles Trumbull got reacquainted with haiku in 1991, literally on a bet. Immediately bitten by the haiku bug, he has since served as newsletter editor (1996–2002) and president (2004–05) of the Haiku Society of America, a founder of Chi-ku, the Chicago-area haiku club, an organizer of Haiku North America—2001 (Chicago), and proprietor of Deep North Press, a publisher of haiku books with 14 titles in print. Since March 2006 he has been editor of Modern Haiku, the oldest haiku journal outside Japan. Trumbull will present 100 Bridges, 100 Traditions, and he is on the panel The Third R: The Role of Research in Haiku. Charles and A.C Missias will co-lead one of the Anonymous Haiku Workshops.
Sculptor Edwin White’s fascination with origami, coupled with a background in graphic and product design often challenges him to treat metals as one would paper. He normally chooses sheet stock for material and relies on multiple and often parallel cuts, perforations, and a lot of “tugging” to coax a shape from its two-dimensional source. As a result, the forms have an innate simplicity that is difficult to duplicate in his other, more involved welded or mixed media assemblies. When Edwin began “expanding” works that incorporated this abundance of cuts, moiré patterns naturally evolved that he now attempts to incorporate in his designs. See his Web site, Edwin White Designs (http://edwinwhitedesigns.com). Edwin is part of Vision/Voice: Exploring Connections Between Art and Haiku, an art exhibit and panel discussion.
Tazuo Yamaguchi has earned a national reputation as a poet, touring performer, and filmmaker for almost a full decade through his solo tours, his films, his long list of collaborations with some of the nation’s finest poets and artists, two national haiku championships, and his "provocative" poetry workouts and workshops that guide the voices of youth to the elders. Tazuo Yamaguchi is a master storyteller, poet and spoken word craftsman with a deep heritage in Shigin Poetry (poet, chanter, and storytellers of the royal court of Japan.) Growing up in the Bay Area, he was influenced by the poets, musicians, and creators of his time. He publishes his own works and implements ancient and modern traditions into new developing digital technologies. Tazuo will produce the conference video for Haiku North America 2007. He will also conduct a Head-to-Head Haiku Competition.