Okay, everyone, I did a thing.

For the last two years, I’ve been serving as program chair for the 2023 Haiku North America conference. Two weeks ago, the Program Committee, which I led, and a statewide team of poets brought the conference to fruition, June 28-July 2, 2023, in Cincinnati.

Haiku North America (HNA) is the world’s largest gathering devoted to English-language haiku and related genres. Since 1991, the biennial conference has taken place in cities across the United States and Canada. This year’s conference marked HNA’s Ohio debut and only its second appearance in the Midwest.

As program chair I was tasked with leading a committee of Ohio haiku poets to create the conference program, including devising the conference theme (City & Soil), ideating topics for conference sessions and other events, inviting presenters, selecting proposals from those submitted by prospective presenters, finalizing the conference program, and implementing the program over the five days of the conference at the beautiful Mercantile Library of Cincinnati and the historic Hilton Netherland Plaza, in Downtown Cincinnati’s Carew Tower.

Serving with me on the Program Committee were poets Elliot Nicely (Lakewood) and Nicky Gutierrez (Akron).

Over a two-year planning period, the Program Committee worked in concert with local arrangements chairs Patti and Buck Niehoff of Cincinnati to bring about all aspects of the conference. I am extremely proud of the work the Program Committee did to create the conference program. Here are some highlights:

• Haibun Innovations panel. Haibun is a genre at once still finding its footing in the English language and poised for great things. As a haibun enthusiast and an award-winning haibun author, I wanted to showcase some of the exciting creative possibilities for haibun and, thus, ignite interest in the genre among the audience at HNA. I assembled a panel of some of the most important writers working in English-language haibun today to share thoughts about the present and future of this genre. In my presentation “Narrative Hybridity in English-Language Haibun,” I offered a new theoretical framework for narrative polyphony in haibun and explored the implications of kire and disjunction in the form. I invited Lew Watts, haibun co-editor of Frogpond, the journal of the Haiku Society of America; Rich Youmans, editor-in-chief of Contemporary Haibun Online; and poet and video poem specialist Dave Bonta to join me on the panel and share their perspectives on new perspectives on the nuts-and-bolts elements of haiku and prose in the haibun genre, recent formal innovations in haibun, and the intersection of haibun and film, respectively. My thanks to Jim Kacian, founder and president of The Haiku Foundation and a poet with deep roots in English-language haibun, for agreeing to moderate the Haibun Innovations panel.

• The world’s first-ever Haibun Film Festival. I wanted to take haibun to the next level as an art form in interdisciplinary conversation with the visual, temporal, and performative art form of film.  To that end, I created the world’s first-ever Haibun Film Festival at HNA 2023. The initiative called for submissions of unpublished English-language haibun that could serve as the basis for original short films. I invited Jim Kacian to join me in adjudicating the anonymized haibun submissions for the Haibun film Festival session at HNA.  And I invited Dave Bonta to publish a submissions call to his video poem community for short films based on the selected haibun and head up a committee to adjudicate the submitted films. Watch for the more about the HNA 2023 Haibun Film Festival, including the selected films themselves, in a future post.

• The Higginson lecture by Tim Green, editor of Rattle, with a guest appearance by Katie Dozier, curator of the NFT Poetry Gallery. The HNA executive board selects the Higginson Lecturer, and this year’s speakers offered an intriguing rationale for publishing (minting) haiku in the virtual realm as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

• The Keynote Address, “Dissolving Boundaries: Haiku and Embodied Care,” by scholar and haiku poet Ce Rosenow. Dr. Rosenow’s talk explored the intersection of haiku and care ethics, and offered a path for extending haiku beyond the page and into the world as acts of care.

• Cultural Journeys in African American Haiku Dr. Ce Rosenow and poet Crystal Simone Smith lead a fascinating and vitally important discussion of the various cultural elements that inform African American poets writing haiku today.

• Ohio Haiku Poets Reading. Ohio boasts a large number of poets writing haiku. This reading featured and celebrated the haiku of dozens of poets from all corners of the state.

Creating HNA 2023 was a massive undertaking involving innumerable moving parts. It was incredibly gratifying to see so many in the global English-language haiku community come together in my home state for this conference – the first in-person HNA gathering since 2019.

I am extremely grateful to Program Committee members Nicky Gutierrez and Elliot Nicely for their creativity, spirit, and commitment to the project; to local arrangements chairs Patti and Buck Niehoff for their generosity as manifested in so many ways; to HNA Directors Michael Dylan Welch, Garry Gay, Paul Miller, and Deborah Kolodji for their support and guidance; and all conference speakers for their contributions.