Selected by Ron C. Moss, Haiga Editor
Haiga Gallery 20.2
About the Artists
Montrealer Maxianne Berger started to focus on Japanese genres at the turn of the millennium. After twenty some years of haiku, tanka and the occasional haibun, she ventured into haiga in early 2021. Alongside French and English, photography has become her other language.
A retired professional musician who dances on ivory and ebony, Alfred Booth is convinced there is poetry in life, you just have to know where to look. To extend the calm music brings to his dailyness, of all activities, poetry alone can be honed in the shower.
Pris Campbell’s work has appeared in numerous journals. She has also placed or had honorable mention in several competitions, including first place in the Marlene Mountain and the Sanford Goldstein 2021 contests, and has published nine books/chapbooks. A former clinical psychologist until sidelined by ME/CFS in 1990, she makes her home with her husband in Southeast Florida.
Kari Davidson (right) lives in Ohio, works as a nurse practitioner, and enjoys hiking, haiku, growing things, and sitting on the porch. Her sister Katie Davis (left) is a mixed media artist who teaches at Columbus College of Art & Design. They’ve recently mixed things up to make a few haiga.
Making art—drawing, painting, collage, writing poetry and prose—has been a part of Cherie Hunter Day’s discovery process ever since she was a girl. She combined her passion for biology and art as a natural science illustrator. A House Meant Only for Summer (Red Moon Press, 2023) is her most recent collection. She lives in Londonderry, NH.
Katja Fox is a poet and visual artist from the United Kingdom. Her work can be found in leading poetry journals online and in print, as well as in her poetry collection ….and out of nowhere. She loves hiking and listening to the red grouse in the Scottish mountains.
Jenny Fraser of Riverweaver —nature lover, musician, artist and poet— lives beside the Pacific Ocean in Mt. Maunganui, New Zealand. Jenny began to write haiku in 2010. Her haiku, senryu, tanka, haiga and haibun are published in New Zealand and International journals. Her latest loves include singing rounds & penny whistling along the seashore.
Pamela Garry took up watercolor painting in her retirement, thanks to her daughter’s encouragement and wonderful teachers— June Webster and Robert Noreika. She fell into haiku during the pandemic. She especially enjoys the inspiration and camaraderie of The Haiku Foundation website. She is tethered by her family and friends, tai chi practice and walking, her synagogue, daily routines and surprises.
Yvette Nicole Kolodji is a southern California poet and artist. Her haiku can be found in many journals and her artwork and haiga can be found in various galleries in the greater Los Angeles area.
Maryam Mermey is a haiku poet & dancer. Akiba Mermey is a nature photographer & tai chi teacher. Together they create haiga, which they enjoy sharing through publication in the Wales Haiku Journal, cattails, and contemporary haibun online. They also exhibit their work throughout Maine. Maryam received a commendation in the 2022 Martin Lucas Award Contest.
Noriko Morishita is a Japanese artist from Tokyo. She especially loves drawing cats. About seven years ago, her cat passed away at the age of 17. She and her cat were soul mates. She started drawing pictures of cats. Now, she receives many requests from many people to draw pictures of cats.
Marianne Paul’s happy obsessions include haiku and related poetic forms, book arts and bookbinding, easy kayaking, shade gardening, and back porch birdwatching. Her chapbook Body Weight: A Collection of Haiku and Art won the inaugural Haiku Canada Marianne Bluger Chapbook Award.
Kala Ramesh is a renowned pioneer in the field of haikai literature in India. Her 2017 book Beyond the Horizon Beyond was awarded a Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize Certificate.
Dian Duchin Reed is an award-winning writer whose poems, articles, essays, and photographs have appeared in many publications. Her books include Medusa Discovers Styling Gel (poetry) and Dao De Jing: Laozi’s Timeless Wisdom (translated from the Chinese). Learn more at dianduchinreed.com.
Alexis Rotella’s latest collection, Milkweed (Brooks Books), contains haiku and senryu from 1979 to 2024. She has published 41 books and her work has been widely anthologized. Alexis lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with her husband Robert and her very large rescue cat, Colby, who has won her heart.
Janet Ruth is a New Mexico ornithologist whose writing focuses on her connections with nature. She has recent poems in Scarlet Dragonfly Journal, Prune Juice, cattails, Cold Moon Journal, and Tandem: The Rengay Journal. Her first book, Feathered Dreams: Celebrating Birds in Poems, Stories & Images (Mercury HeartLink, 2018), was a finalist for the 2018 NM/AZ Book Awards. redstartsandravens.com
A resident of Alaska, Bonnie J. Scherer originally hails from Wisconsin. Once she discovered the joy of writing Japanese-style poetry, she was hooked. She finds that the thrill of pairing her photographs, paintings, or digital images with the written word takes the artistry to a new level. Her poetry has been published in venues and on platforms throughout the world.
Elizabeth Shack lives in central Illinois with her spouse, cat, and an expanding collection of art supplies and gardening tools. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Writers Resist, Daily Science Fiction, Drifting Sands, cattails, and other venues.
Shloka Shankar is a poet and visual artist from Bangalore, India. A Best of the Net nominee and award-winning haiku poet, she is the founding editor of Sonic Boom and its imprint, Yavanika Press. Her debut haiku collection, The Field of Why, was shortlisted for the Touchstone Distinguished Book Awards 2022.
Debbie Strange is a chronically ill short-form poet and haiga artist whose creative passions connect her more closely to the world and to herself. She is honored to be the recipient of the 2020 Snapshot Press Book Award for her full-length haiku collection Random Blue Sparks, forthcoming.
Luminita Suse is a computer scientist living in Ottawa, Canada. Published widely, she is the author of two tanka collections: A Thousand Fireflies / Mille Lucioles (2011) and Winter Fire (2016), both published in Canada by Éditions des petits nuages. She has also won several awards, most recently a Sakura Award in the 2021 Vancouver Cherry Blossom Haiku Contest.
Maria Tosti is an Italian poet from Perugia. Her passions are writing, photography, and drawing. She enjoys visual art and she is also a video maker. Her works have appeared in various art and literary publications as well as online journals. Her first sylloge is a multilingual book. Learn more at http://mariatosti.wixsite.com/mariatosti.