Kat Creighton
(1955 – 15 January 2014)
In January 2014 the haiku community was shocked and saddened to hear that fellow writer Kat Creighton has passed away.
Kat Creighton was born into a large Irish Catholic family in 1955. Throughout high school she was writing for the school newspaper. Later she earned a BA in English from Kean University specializing in Creative Writing where she had her first poem published in their literary journal “Grubstreet Writer”.
Although she loved writing, nothing seemed quite right until in her adulthood she rediscovered haiku while reading a novel relating to Japanese culture. The has studied the short forms ever since. In the 1990s through the internet, she came along the World Haiku Club and authors like Basho, Issa, and Masajo Suzuki. She admired Masajo Suzuki's sensitive haiku and relied on them as sources of education and constant inspiration. To Kat the connection between nature and human nature was spiritual as well as physical. And being a photographer as well as a poet, Kat combined words and images to create the Japanese poetic form known as haiga. As her home was on the New Jersey coast, she often focused her work on the maritime landscape that she knew and loved. She featured it in online journals and in her blog called “My Ninth Life” during the past several years.
Kat Creighton’s haiku have been published in several electronic journals, including World Haiku Review, Short Stuff, Moments, Visual Haiku, Pegasus Dreaming and temps libres. Creighton’s haiku and haiga have appeared in A Hundred Gourds, Haiga Online, Sketchbook, and Simply Haiku.
Kat’s advice for haiku writers: “What speaks to you personally - that will make for your best writing.”
nearing sixty…
and still the desire
to fly
http://www.pinterest.com/umisprite/pins/
http://simplyhaikujournal.com/past-issues/summer-2012/simply-haiga/kat-creighton.html
http://ahundredgourds.com/ahg11/haiga20.html
