Michael Dylan Welch

Michael Dylan Welch is a poet and editor who lives near Seattle, Washington. He grew up in England (where he's from), and in Ghana, Australia, and Canada, and has published his poems in more than twenty languages in hundreds of journals and anthologies (including three Norton anthologies). He served two terms as poet laureate for Redmond, Washington, where he curates two monthly poetry reading series and is president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword. Michael founded National Haiku Writing Month (www.nahaiwrimo.com), and is director of the Seabeck Haiku Getaway, a longtime officer of the Haiku Society of America, cofounder of the American Haiku Archives and the Haiku North America conference, and founder and president of the Tanka Society of America. He edited the journal Woodnotes from 1989 to 1997, followed by Tundra: The Journal of the Short Poem. Michael currently coedits a haiku journal, First Frost. He has published dozens of books and anthologies, mostly poetry, including books translated from the Japanese. In 2012, a poem he cotranslated from the Japanese with Emiko Miyashita, from their book Hyakunin Isshu - 100 Poets: Passions of the Imperial Court, appeared on the back of 150,000,000 United States postage stamps. His poems have also been carved into stone and printed on balloons, performed at the Baseball Hall of Fame, and recited for the Empress of Japan. In 2013, he was the keynote speaker for the annual Haiku International Association conference in Tokyo. Michael's personal website, devoted mostly to haiku, tanka, and other poetry, including hundreds of essays and reviews, is www.graceguts.com. His favourite quotation about haiku is by Roland Barthes, who said, "haiku has this rather fantasmagorical property: that we always suppose we ourselves can write such things easily."