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Biographies of Authors
Suezan Aikins
Suezan Aikins, brought up in Montréal surrounded by Eastern and Western art, weaves these two aesthetics together in her work. She and her husband live and work by the sea in Nova Scotia. After studies in Canada and Japan, her contemplative Japanese woodblock prints and atmospheric paints have been widely exhibited on both continents.
In 1984, while sifting through 20 years of her poetry and prose, she picked up the scissors and cut away everything except the live words. This distillation led naturally to haiku which she has been writing ever since. Her work has been published in North American and Japanese journals, magazines, and anthologies. Petal on the Stream and Morning Breeze were published in 1985 and 1987. She is also included in Narrow Road to Renga.
Charles B. Dickson (1915 – 1991)
Charles B. Dickson was a retired newspaper and magazine writer and editor. He had been writing poetry and short stories more than fifty years. His first poem in a literary journal appeared in 1935. He has won numerous awards for both his poetry and fiction.
He wrote his first haiku in 1984. Four books of his poetry, three of them haiku, have been published. He was an active member of the Georgia State Poetry Society and belonged to a number of other state poetry societies. He had several renga in progress with others, finding it "a fascinating and challenging poetic form."
He had been married fifty-three years and has a daughter, a son, and granddaughter. He was not too sanguine about being married fifty-three more.
Brent Partridge
Brent Partridge was born in Anchorage, Alaska, and is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Although he has primarily earned his living by matters relating to the garden, and is presently a natural foods baker, he reads widely and has done a great deal of formal meditation. He has been published for several years in the best haiku journals, and has been writing poetry for over twenty years.
Francine Porad (1929 – 2006)
Francine Porad lived on Mercer Island, Washington, where she paint, wrote, and edited the haiku journal, Brussels Sprout. In addition to appearances in many U.S., Canadian, and Japanese publications, her haiku have been featured on public TV's Cactus Poetry Series: Francine Porad, A&M Production Company, Seattle, 1988.
Ms. Porad holds a BFA degree from the University of Washington and juried membership in the National League of American Pen Women (Letters and Art), the Northwest Watercolor Society, and Women Painters of Washington. Recent competitions exhibiting her artwork include the American Watercolor Society (NY) and International Collage Traveling Exhibition '89-'90. Her video, CROSS-FADE: A Painting/Poetry Spectrum, produced by Kuroiwa-Leonard Media Arts, Seattle, combines the two art forms.
Jane Reichhold
Knowing nothing is really important, but believing that the smallest action affects the whole, Jane Reichhold nearly has a combined degree in Art and Journalism earned while raising three children. In 1971 love was extended to Werner Reichhold and another three children plus, presently at last count, ten grandchildren. After living 16 years in Hamburg, Germany, she and Werner are now home in Northern California.
In other years Jane Reichhold wrote free-lance articles for more than 20 magazines while exhibiting her large rope sculptures in Europe and America, but is now editor and publisher of Mirrors, a haiku magazine, and AHA Books. Jane Reichhold has written 13 books of and about haiku, renga, and tanka.
Werner Reichhold
Werner Reichhold was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1925. Inducted into the army in the last months of the war, Reichhold was wounded, taken prisoner, and held by the British from 1945-48 in a POW camp on the Bitter Sea, Egypt. The next four years Werner Reichhold studied with sculptors in academies in Berlin, Hamburg, and Paris. Later he taught in the Hanover Art School. In 1962 he won the Rome Award to study further in Italy.
Reichhold's indoor-outdoor sculptures and installations are placed in several European cities. He has had over 80 exhibits in Europe, USA, Canada, South America, and Japan documented in 60 catalogs with 15 books about his one-man shows and several TV documentaries made; one of which (1984) was shown in 80 countries.
His three books of haiku and tanka are: Handshake (Second Place Merit Book Award, Haiku Society of America for 1989), Tidalwave (1989), and Bridge of Voices (1990).
Ken-ichi Sato
Born in Tokyo and after graduating from the Keio University there, Ken-ichi Sato moved to Sakata, a northern city on the western coast of Japan. Here he teaches and writes for a local newspaper.
From 1978-1981 he worked for the Los Angeles based Japanese-English newspaper, Kashu Mainichi. He still has close ties with the newspaper and articles appear regularly in which he translates American haiku into Japanese.
Ken-ichi Sato's outdoor activities include mountain climbing, paragliding and skiing.
Ruby Spriggs (1929 – 2001)
Born and educated in England, Ruby Spriggs emigrated to Canada in 1957 where she studied the arts of painting and poetry.
Her haiku have been published in England and Japan and in most haiku publications in North America. Her work is included in The Haiku Handbook (Mcgraw-Hill), The Canadian Haiku Anthology (Asticou), and in How to Write and Publish Poetry (Wordshop).
Awards include: Best of Issue Awards for haiku published in Frogpond, The Sanwa Bank Award USA 1981, and she was an award winner in the 1988 Japan Air Lines International Contest.
Ruby Spriggs was the author of one book of haiku, Sunshadow, Moonshadow published by Heron's Cove Press, 1986. She was editor of the Haiku Canada Newsletter.
Lequita Vance
Lequita Vance, a Carmel resident for over 22 years, began in Texas with stops in Germany and France on the road to California.
A haiku poet for over eight years, Lequita Vance was winner of the High Coo Chapbook Book Competition Contest for 1984 and was awarded as prize, publication of Dark with Stars, a collection of poems dedicated to her eldest son, John, who was killed in 1962. In 1987 Lequita put together a show of haiku and art that was shown in Jackson, Tennessee, at the main library at University of California, Santa Cruz, and at the Carmel Cultural Gallery.
As interior decorator, she recently completed a large condo in Menlo Park that follows a Japanese style which has been filmed for TV in Japan.
Paul O. Williams (1935 – 2009)
Paul O. Williams was born and raised in Chatham, New Jersey. He received a BA from Principia College, in Illinois, in 1956, and immediately began graduate work in English at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving a MA and PhD.
After teaching for three years at Duke University, he returned to Principia College for twenty-two years of English teaching, during which he wrote and published many poems, essays, reviews and scholarly articles, as well as much haiku. He began publishing science fiction novels there in 1980. To date eight of them have seen print.
His work as a haiku poet began in 1964 in Elsah, Illinois, after a student asked him what he knew about it – which was nothing. He began publishing in haiku magazines soon after and has ever since. In 1982 he brought out a collection of 64 poems, Tracks on the River. Since moving to California, he had been active in the Haiku Poets of Northern California as co-editor of Woodnotes.
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