Michael Dylan Welch

Sitting in the Sun Michael Dylan Welch

Sitting in the Sun collects haiku and senryu by more than ninety attendees of the 2019 Haiku North America conference, held August 7 to 11, 2019 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Edited by Michael Dylan Welch and Crystal Simone Smith, this anthology features many leading poets writing haiku in English, together with North Carolina-themed artwork by Kate MacQueen. "Sitting in the Sun celebrates the fifteenth biennial Haiku North America conference, held in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 2019. These conferences provide an array of academic research and inspired readings and presentations, but they're also a kind of 'sitting on the porch a spell, ' a gathering of friends to enjoy the day, to talk about a favorite poetic subject, and to ponder-or avoid-the ups and downs that life has to offer. In the very first Haiku North America anthology in 1991, the collection's poems were arranged by each poet's first name, and we've been doing that ever since. It's a sort of front-porch familiarity that we continue to value-and seek to promote. So please sit a spell with these poems and poets." -adapted from the introduction MICHAEL DYLAN WELCH is a poet, editor, and publisher. In 1991 he cofounded Haiku North America, and has edited all HNA conference anthologies. In 1996 he cofounded the American Haiku Archives, and in 2000 he founded the Tanka Society of America, serving as its president for five years, then returning again as president in 2018. In 2008 he cofounded the Seabeck Haiku Getaway, which he continues to direct, and in 2010 he founded National Haiku Writing Month (www.nahaiwrimo.com). He has also served for many years as vice president of the Haiku Society of America, and served two terms as poet laureate of Redmond, Washington. His poems have won first place in numerous contests (including the Henderson, Brady, Tokutomi, Bacopa, and Drevniok contests), and have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies in more than twenty languages-including a tanka translation on the back of 150,000,000 U. S. postage stamps in 2012. He has also published numerous books of haiku and related poetry, the latest including Jumble Box: Haiku and Senryu from National Haiku Writing Month (Press Here, 2017) and Seven Suns, Seven Moons, a collaboration with Tanya McDonald (NeoPoiesis Press, 2016). His website, which features his essays, reviews, and poems, is www.graceguts.com. CRYSTAL SIMONE SMITH is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Routes Home (Finishing Line Press, 2013) and Running Music (Longleaf Press, 2014). She is also the author of Wildflowers: Haiku, Senryu, and Haibun (2016). Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Callaloo, Nimrod, Barrow Street, Obsidian II: Literature in the African Diaspora, African American Review, and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change. She is an alumna of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the Yale Summer Writers Conference. She holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and two sons where she teaches English composition and creative writing. She is the managing editor of Backbone Press (www.backbonepress.org).