John Stevenson

Born 1948 in Ithaca, New York, USA
Living in Nassau, New York, USA
The Heron's Nest website 
Upstate Dim Sum website 
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Michelle Tennison

Born 1963 in Cumberland, Maryland USA
Living in Blackwood, New Jersey USA

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Andrew Terrell

Born: USA 1991
Living in: Dharug Country
Bio: Andrew Terrell was born and raised in the Skagit Valley.
Site: https://www.instagram.com/andrew_terrell_art/

Carrie Ann Thunell

Born 1958 in USA.

Carrie Ann (CAT) Thunell has had poetry and/or art published in over 75 print magazines.

She was editor of the Nisqually Delta Review, which ran for 3 years. Her haiga has been on Simply Haiku, and Haigaonline. Ms Thunell has been published in several of Robert Epstein’s haiku anthologies.

Richard Tice

Born in the U.S.A.; currently resides in Kent, Washington, U.S.A.
Richard Tice started writing haiku and essays on the form in the 1970s while teaching English in Japan. In the ‘80s he edited Dragonfly: East/West Haiku Quarterly. He has translated more than 200 Japanese haiku. Two collections of his haiku, Station Stop and Familiar and Foreign, have been published.

Tom Tico

(15 May 1942 – 4 February 2016)

Thomas Michael Tico was born on 15 May 1942 in San Francisco, California and he lived nearly all his life in the city he loved. Tom Tico’s first haiku appeared in American Haiku in 1966. And since then his poems have been steadily published in various haiku magazines and in a number of anthologies: Cor van den Heuvel’s “The Haiku Anthology”, Bruce Ross’s “Haiku Moment”, and the “San Francisco Haiku Anthology”.  Tom also had numerous essays published, mainly in Frogpond, Modern Haiku and other haiku journals. In 1989 Tom Tico was a co-judge to the “1989 Gerald Brady Senryu Awards”. In 1992, he co-edited The San Francisco Haiku Anthology (Smythe-Waithe Press, 1992).

Committed to living an artistic life, Tom Tico dedicated his life to his passion as a haiku poet. In the early 70's, he determined conventional employment was no longer for him. He resigned from his work with the US Postal Service, and dedicated his time and energy for the remainder of his life to creative and personally satisfying pursuits. While his commitment to this path was not without challenges, Tom never wavered from his absolute certainty that he was living his life the way he needed to in order to be true to himself.

In 1998 Tom self-published a book "Spring Morning Sun". In the ‘Introduction’ to the book he wrote: “From 1985 through 1995 I spent over seven years in a state of homelessness, sleeping in a redwood forest in Golden Gate Park.”  His experience from those years shaped his haiku significantly. Tom’s life just comes through in his haiku:

At the soup kitchen,
   a faded reproduction
      of The Last Supper

In my sleeping bag
   in a fetal position;
      this cold autumn night

Later in his life, Tom developed a passion for photography, and applied the same lens evident in many of his haiku - the beauty of the marriage between the natural and the urban environment.

Tom loved to walk, which gave him the opportunity to find inspiration for his haiku or his photography. Movies and books were two of Tom's other life-long enjoyments. He had an extraordinary knowledge of movies, directors, actors and authors.

Tom Tico passed away peacefully on 4 February 2016 due to a degenerative lung disease. On the last night of his life, he reflected with contentment on his life "as an outsider", the significance of being able to take satisfaction in the character of his children, and his readiness for whatever came next. Tom is survived by his brother, Edward Tico; children: Christopher, Alexander, Minerva and Nathanael Tico; daughters-in-law: Wendy, Kristin and Rebecca; and grandchildren: Jonathan, Alex, Jordan, Morgan, Reeva, Adrian, Gabriella, and Sawyer.

Some publications:

• Tico, Tom. “Personification” [workshop]. Frogpond 21.1 (1998);
• Tico, Tom. “The Imaginative Haiku: Readings by Tom Tico” [workshop]. Frogpond 20.1 (1999);
• Tico, Tom. “Affinities: Thoreau and the Japanese Haiku Poets” [workshop]. Frogpond 22.3 (1999);
• Tico, Tom. “Like a Fine Wine” [workshop]. Frogpond 22.2 (1999);
• Tico, Tom. “The Dark Side of Kali” [workshop]. Frogpond 22.1 (1999);
• Tico, Tom. “The Music of Haiku” [workshop]. Frogpond 24.2 (2001);
• Tico, Tom. “The Sad, Lonely Poetry of the City” [workshop]. Frogpond 20.3 (12/1/1997);
• Tico, Tom. “Endlessness in a Small Frame: Readings” [workshop]. Frogpond 18.2 (summer 1995);
• Tico, Tom. “A Handful of Shadows, Readings” [workshop]. Frogpond 18.4 (winter 1995);
• Tico, Tom. “Tassajara Zen Center” [sequence [5]]. Modern Haiku 10:1 (Winter–Spring 1979);
• Tico, Tom. “A Reading of Marjory Bates Pratt” [workshop]. Modern Haiku 13:1 (Winter–Spring 1982);
• Tico, Tom. “Scarecrow Reading” [workshop]. Modern Haiku 13:2 (Summer 1982);
• Tico, Tom. “The Sun the Moon and the Stars: A Reading of Foster Jewell” [workshop]. Modern Haiku 14:2 (Summer 1983);
• Tico, Tom. “The Peach-Blossom Spring [O Southard]” [workshop]. Modern Haiku 14:3 (Fall 1983);
• Tico, Tom. “River and Mountain: A Reading of Larry Gates” [workshop [10]]. Modern Haiku 15:1 (Winter- Spring 1984);
• Tom Tico, "The Spice of Life", Frogpond 30:1 (winter 2007).

In anthologies:

• Cor van den Heuvel, editor. The Haiku Anthology: English Language Haiku by Contemporary American and Canadian Poets (1974).
• Cor van den Heuvel, editor. The Haiku Anthology: Haiku and Senryu in English (revised [2nd] edition, 1986), and (expanded [3rd] edition, 1999).
• Bruce Ross, ed., Haiku Moment (1993)

Selected haiku: 

autumn evening . . .
   a page of the old book
      separates from the spine

(Honorable Mention: 1999 Harold G. Henderson Memorial Award)

*
First days of summer . . .
      already the leaves gather
            beneath the sycamores

(Honorable Mention: 1990 Harold G. Henderson Memorial Award)

*

A wisp of spring cloud
  drifting apart from the rest. . . .
     slowly evaporates.

(“The Haiku Anthology Revised Edition”, Simon and Schuster, 1986, pg. 242)

*

old plum trees:
   how quickly the one dies
      after the other

(Modern Haiku 38:3, autumn 2007)

*

at the burial
one of the black umbrellas
breaks down

(Modern Haiku 41:3, autumn 2010)

*

in this little part
of the solar system
      dust motes

(Frogpond 37:3, Autumn 2014)

*

Sandpipers
running along the glassy beach
on top of themselves

a windless morning
and still the plum blossoms
flutter to the ground

Dusk …
the whole forest dark
except for the lilies

Engulfing
the purple rhododendrons
shadows of evening

a morning fog:
again and again the caw
of an unseen crow

On every step
of the old stone stairway –
autumn leaves

(Haiku Moment: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku, Tuttle Publishing, 1993) edited by Bruce Ross

*

As day breaks...
   the lightness of her breath
       on my back

(“The Haiku Anthology”, ed. by Cor van den Heuvel, Norton 1999, pg.222)

*

Sitting in the sun
    in the middle of the plants
        that I just watered

(Woodnotes 25, 1995)

*

Beside the tenement
a box of broken glass
filled with autumn sun

Mud-puddle water
going this way and that--
spring wind

After gazing at stars . . .
now, I adjust to the rocks
under my sleeping bag

Nothing to bring her . . .
except flowers from the gardens
all along the way

Shortening the line
at the soup kitchen--
the first fall rain

The old carving tree . . .
a new pair of initials
and the first young leaves

The white butterfly
just the touch of my shadow
and it flies away

("Spring Morning Sun" (1998)

*

Misting across
the cold bright stars -
my own breath

(Published in San Francisco Chronicle on Feb. 28, 2016)

This profile was created with the kind help of Charles Trumbull, Peggy Mather, John Stevenson and Michael Dylan Welch.

And this is Tom’s tribute written by his children at the San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 28, 2016:

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?n=thomas-tico&pid=177872280

Sources:

• http://shapingwords.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/spring-morning-sun-review-of-haiku-of.html
• http://home.earthlink.net/~tclausen/id23.html
• http://www.hsa-haiku.org/hendersonawards/henderson.htm
• http://www.hsa-haiku.org/frogpond/backissues/37-3-Frogpond-Autumn-2014.pdf
• http://www.modernhaiku.org/issue38-3/haiku38-3.html
• http://www.poetrysociety.org.nz/node/426
• https://thehaikuexperiment.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/wither-tom-tico/
• http://haikureality.theartofhaiku.com/esejeng128.htm
• http://www.kenjoneszen.com/haiku/chrysanthemums_and_black_battleships

foghorns…
the vague shapes
of familiar trees

beneath purple leaves
the unpicked fruit
stains the sidewalk

after a long stretch of stargazing   first light

around the corner
from the swank nursing home
one for the poor

Valentine’s Day:
my heart favors
the plum blossoms

in this little part
of the solar system
      dust motes

loosening        
    the hard and fast lines
        fog

following the lead my elongated shadow

cold park:
so many trees
skeletonized

emphysema --
it could be the name
of an exotic femme fatale
who ends up leaving you
breathless

Easter morning
rising later
than usual

angels’ trumpets
yet here and there
a bit of rust

insomnia…
getting to know
the night

the chiaroscuro of crows and morning mist

intermittent rain the long and the short of it

making the most
of the broken-down fence
        nasturtiums

in the world
but not of it --
autumn wind

just another
of winter’s losses --
my singing voice

every bit as black
as the plumage of the crows --
their strident cries

Tom Tico

May 15, 1942 - February 4, 2016
Tom Tico's Legacy Biography

Ted van Zutphen

Born 1950 in Rotterdam, Netherlands
Living in a mobile home travelling USA
http://nierf.com
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Christine L. Villa

Born in Quezon City, Philippines
Living in Sacramento, California, USA
http://blossomrain.blogspot.com
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Joseph P. Wechselberger

Born 1946 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA
Living in Browns Mills, New Jersey USA
Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Joseph has been retired since March 2007. He began writing haiku in 2018 and is member of the Haiku Society of America. His work has been Touchstone nominated in 2021 and 2022 and has appeared in 33 haiku journals, Haiku 2022, and jar of rain: The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku 2020.

Neal Whitman

Born 1948 in Boston Massachusetts, USA
Living in Pacific Grove, California, USA
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Joshua Eric Williams

Born 1983 in Carrollton, GA, USA
Joshua Eric Williams is from Carrollton, GA. He has an M.A. in Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry from Western State Colorado University. His work explores and experiments with short forms (including haiku, senryu, epigrams, sonnets, pantoums, and villanelles).

John Wills

(4 July 1921 – 24 September 1993)

John Howard Wills was born on 4 July 1921 in Los Angeles, California. He received an MA degree from the University of Chicago in 1951, and a PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1961. For more than two decades John taught American and English literature at universities in Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee and during that time, he published critical essays on T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and other writers. After the death of his first wife, he married artist and poet Marlene Morelock (now known as Marlene Mountain). They worked together on several haiku projects with him writing the poem and her creating the artwork behind the poem – drawings and photographs.

John’s earliest attempts at writing haiku were made in 1965 after Marlene showed him 'The Way of Zen' by Alan Watts. Actually his earliest haiku writing was influenced by his children's poems.  Later in 1968, a colleague gave John and Marlene some back copies of ‘American Haiku’ (which had published its last issue that May). John’s serious interest in haiku began after getting acquainted with the work of Nicholas Virgilio. As he wrote more and more haiku, his skills quickly improved and some early work appeared in 1969 in Haiku West, SCTH, Haiku (Canada), and Haiku Spotlight (Japan). Within that same year, John published his first two books - Weathervanes and Back Country. If one considers the poets publishing in early ‘American haiku’ as the first wave, John was among the second wave of  contemporary writers of English-language haiku and some of his earliest work did not follow the traditional rules. He had a very unique style of writing and according to some haiku experts there was a certain iambic meter to his style, almost like a musical flow in his haiku. Encouraged by his wife Marlene Mountain who was one of the first English-language haiku poets to write haiku regularly in a single horizontal line, John wrote some 'one-line' haiku which were later published.

In 1970, John spent the summer studying haiku in Matsuyama, Japan, under a research grant from Georgia Southern College, and in 1971, he moved with his family to Tennessee. They lived on 100 acres in the mountains of Tennessee and named their land "Sweetwater." Much of his best work was written there and he would be called by some the greatest nature poet writing haiku.

By the end of his life, John Wills had published more than 800 haiku and nine books. His haiku were published in journals and anthologies and his work still appears in articles and essays written by a new generation of haiku poets, as well as by his contemporaries who continue to cherish and admire his work. John Wills died on 24 September 1993.

Books Published:

• Weathervanes, published by Rhoda de Long Jewell ; (Sangre de Cristo Press, 1969);
• Back Country, photographs by Marlene M. Wills. Partial funding: Georgia Southern College (1969);
• river, drawings by Marlene M. Wills for Georgia Southern College (1970), 2nd ed. Elizabethton, Tenn. (1976); 
• The Young Leaves: Haiku of Spring and Summer,drawings by Marlene M. Wills. Statesboro, Ga.: Georgia Southern College (1970);
• Cornstubble: Haiku of Fall and Winter, Photographs by Marlene M. Wills. Statesboro, Ga.: Georgia Southern College  (1971);
• 21 haiku greeting cards, haiku by John Wills, drawings/design by Marlene Wills, 1977, self-published, TN;
• Up a Distant Ridge, Manchester, N.H.: First Haiku Press (1980);
• Reed Shadows, Sherbrooke, Que./Windsor, Ont.: Burnt Lake Press/Black Moss Press (1987);
• mountain, S.E. Publishing (1993).

Awards and other Honours:

• Appointed to the first Haiku Society Awards Committee (the Society accepted the committee's recommendations and added awards for Wills' books Back Country and river);
•  Served on the first selections panel for Frogpond magazine;
• First Honourable Mention, HSA Merit Book Awards for Reed Shadows;
• John had 21 haiku selected for the 1974 edition of The Haiku Anthology, 36 haiku for the 1986 edition, and 40 for the 1999 edition.

Selected works:

The hills
    release the summer clouds
         one . . . by one . . . by one

(Back Country, Wills J., (1969)

the old field
throbs with insects...
summer moon

(Frogpond 8:3 (1985)

autumn wind
the rise and fall
of sparrows

(Modern Haiku 18:1 (winter-spring 1987)

the river
leans upon the snag
a moment

(Reed Shadows, Wills, J.,Sherbrooke, QC.: Burnt Lake Press, 1987)

dusk from rock to rock a waterthrush

(Up a Distant Ridge (1980); The Haiku Anthology, Van Den Heuvel, Cor, ed. , New York: Norton, 2000, p.301)

in an upstairs room
of the abandoned house
a doll moongazing

(The Haiku Anthology, Van Den Heuvel, Cor, ed. , New York: Norton, 2000, p.304)

i catch
the maple leaf        then let
it go

(from Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness and Open Your Heart by Patricia Donegan, Shambhala Publications Inc, 2008)

More of John’s early haiku at:

http://www.marlenemountain.org/backward/limage/ftm8c_jwillshaiku.html

Some articles, essays and interviews with John Wills:

• Wills, John, "Depth in Haiku," unpublished essay (1974);
•  van den Heuvel, Cor, ed., The Haiku Anthology, New York: Anchor Books (1974);
•  McClintock, Michael, "A Conversation With John Wills," Modern Haiku 7:2 (1976), 6-8;
• van den Heuvel, Cor, "John Wills and One-Line Haiku - I: A Troutswirl Simplicity", Frogpond 4:4 (1981), 30–33;
• van den Heuvel, Cor, "John Wills and One-Line Haiku – II: One-Liners", Frogpond 5:1 (1982), 38–45;
• van den Heuvel, Cor, "John Wills and One-Line Haiku – III: Three in One or One in Three", Frogpond 5:3 (1982), 38–46 [Correction in Frogpond VI;1 (1983), 45-46;
• St. Jacques, Elizabeth, "The Importance of Rhythm in Haiku," Woodnotes 15 (1992);
• Estevez, Efren, "Images of John Wills," Frogpond XXVII:1 (2004), 55-57;
• Estevez, Efren, "Troutswirl: Art in the Nature Poems of John Wills," The Haiku Society of America Newsletter XXI:4 (2006), 12-13.

Sources:

http://www.marlenemountain.org/mminfo/mi_mmjw_books.html
http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/poet-details/?IDclient=7
http://terebess.hu/english/usa/wills.html
http://performance.millikin.edu/haiku/writerprofiles/RuffnerOnWills.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_in_English
http://www.hsa-haiku.org/frogpond/2010-issue33-2/essay2-miller.html
http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/RossEssay.html

This profile was created in collaboration with John Wills’ wife the poet and artist Marlene Mountain. We appreciate her help in updating the available information on John’s biography and publications! 

Billie Wilson

(born August 1, 1941, Lafayette, Indiana, U.S.A.) is a long-time member of the Haiku Society of America, and served several terms as Regional Coordinator for the Alaska Region. Since 2003, she has coordinated the annual haiku competition honoring her first mentor, Robert Spiess. She helped create and care for The Haiku Foundation's Haiku Registry (2009-2018). She served as Associate Editor for The Heron’s Nest (2011 - 2017). Some of her awards include the Harold G. Henderson Memorial Award, the Gerald Brady Memorial Award, and The Heron's Nest Readers' Choice Poem of the Year. She has resided in Juneau, Alaska, since 1962.

Robert D. Wilson

Born 1949 in Los Angeles, California, USA
Living in Philippines
http://lousymirror.blogspot.com
http://simplyhaikujournal.com
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John W. Wisdom

Born in Tampa, Florida, USA
Living in South Sarasota, Florida, USA
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Valorie Broadhurst Woerdehoff

Born 1954 in the USA
Valorie Broadhurst Woerdehoff, originally from Northern California (USA), has for the last nearly 35 years called Dubuque, Iowa, home. Her poems, including haiku, senryu and rengay, have been widely published. She has judged haiku contests and earned awards for her writing and haiku on the local and national level.

Keith Woodruff

Born in San Jose, California, in 1963. Currently living in Ohio and missing the ocean. I have an MA in poetry from Purdue U, and am honored to have had my work appear in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Mayfly, Acorn, A Hundred Gourds, and the Big Sky: the Red Moon anthology.

Gideon Young

Gideon Young is a member of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective, a Fellow for A+ Schools of North Carolina, a K-12 Literacy Specialist, and a stay-at-home dad. His debut haiku collection my hands full of light was published by Backbone Press (2021). His poetry is included in Best Spiritual Literature 2022 (Orison Books) and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Gideon is co-author of One Window’s Light: A Collection of Haiku, published by Unicorn Press, 2017, winner of the Haiku Society of America Merit Award for Best Anthology. Find recent and forthcoming work in Callaloo, Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, Juxta 8, North Carolina Literary Review, Our State Magazine, and Pan Haiku Review. Winner of a 2023 Arts in Education Artist Residency Grant from the North Carolina Arts Council, discover more at www.gideonyoung.com.