New to Haiku: Charlotte Digregorio Interviews Poet and Educator Jennifer Hambrick

As part of New to Haiku’s Interviews with Haiku Educators series, Charlotte Digregorio shares her interview with Jennifer Hambrick. Thanks, Charlotte and Jennifer!

Seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee Jennifer Hambrick has received numerous awards for her free verse poetry, Japanese short-form poetry, haiga, and literary criticism, including a 2025 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America for the collection of haiku and short prose poems a silence or two (also shortlisted for the Touchstone Book Award from The Haiku Foundation); the 2022 Marianne Bluger Book Award from Haiku Canada for the haibun collection Joyride (also shortlisted for the Touchstone Book Award from The Haiku Foundation); the Stevens Manuscript Award of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies for the free verse poetry collection In the High Weeds; and the 2024 JUXTA Award for Excellence in Haiku Research and Scholarship for her critical essay “Found in Translation: The Kon Nichi Translation Group, Gendai Haiku, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Haiku in English,” published in Juxtapositions, the journal of haiku research and scholarship.

Hambrick has been featured by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser in American Life in Poetry, on Rattle poetry journal’s Rattlecast livestream, and elsewhere, and her poems been published in Rattle, The Columbia Review, Southeast Review, The Santa Clara Review, Maryland Literary Review, A New Resonance: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku, vol. 13, ed. Jim Kacian (Red Moon Press, 2023); multiple editions of the Haiku 20XX anthologies (ed. Lee Gurga and Scott Metz, Modern Haiku Press); all of the English-language haikai journals; and in dozens of other journals and invited anthologies around the world.

By invitation, Hambrick writes the column In Other Worlds, criticism on explorative haiku, for Modern Haiku journal and authored the Afterword to Haiku 2026: 100 notable ku from 2025, ed. Lee Gurga and Scott Metz (Modern Haiku Press, 2026). Her haibun criticism appears in Contemporary Haibun Online and is forthcoming in the Journal of Ethnic American Studies.

A frequent recipient of poetry commissions, Hambrick is often featured in interdisciplinary collaborations. Winner of the 2020 Sheila-Na-Gig Poetry Prize, the 2021 Martin Lucas Haiku Award, four First Place honors in the inaugural Heliosparrow Haiku Frontier Awards (2024), and the 2018 Haibun Award Competition of the Haiku Society of America, Hambrick has also received awards from Tokyo’s NHK World TV, Haiku Poets of Northern California, the Ohio Poetry Association, and many others. By appointment, Hambrick served as the inaugural artist-in-residence of Bryn Du Mansion (Granville, Ohio). A public radio broadcaster, multimedia producer, and classical musician, she lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Jennifer, you have an extensive background in classical music, as a high-level orchestral musician, a musicologist, and a music broadcaster and journalist. What is the connection between your musical background and your work as a poet, including your work with haikai genres?

My musical background informs all of my work as a writer, including my work as a poet in “mainstream” and haikai genres. Music and poetry are two sides of the same coin, and for me, writing poetry is making music with words. I am always seeking to grow as a writer in as many dimensions as possible; writing in haikai genres offers interesting creative challenges. My work as a cultural journalist and as a scholar (musicologist and literary critic) also informs my approach to writing in all poetic genres and vice versa.

Musicality of language in haiku is the same as musicality of language in any other context or type of writing. There are the sounds of vowels and consonants and how they may or may not create alliteration and assonance in conjunction with image and idea. There are the rhythms of words and how a string of word-rhythms embodies the feel and tension of a poetic line. There are the line breaks and how they affect the flow of a poem. In English writing, the juxtaposition of Latinate and Germanic words is always an extremely important consideration. How those word families are used or balanced in a poem affects that poem’s musicality and feel. I consider all of these elements and others in not just haiku, not just poetry more broadly, but in everything I write.

To achieve musicality in their own haiku, poets must first do what any serious writer of any type does and be a constant, omnivorous, and critical reader. Read not just haiku journals and collections, but also novels, non-fiction books, encyclopedias, collections of longer lyric poetry, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker (to name a few), blogs, and Substacks written by noted authorities in every field imaginable. Read for, yes, the meaning and the argument, but read also for the craft, the sound and musicality of each author’s writing. Hear its rhythm in your head. Read passages aloud. Develop a musical ear for language. The craft of writing begins with the craft of reading. And there will never come a time in one’s writing life when reading becomes less important.

I’ll add that reading is also rapidly becoming an act of resistance in the current technological landscape. In the act of reading, we demonstrate a commitment to investing in and learning from humankind’s awe-inspiring creative gifts. The machines are learning so much from us about language. It’s imperative that we outread them.

How do you play with haiku language? Do you write various drafts of each haiku?

I tend to write poems in all genres by way of thinking and feeling through what I really wish to say, jumping in, and taking a highly intuitive approach to specifics of word choice. My work as a poet is really to get out of the way of that intuitive process and let the language, the music I hear in my inner ear, and the imagery arise from a very deep place of inner awareness. I prefer to let a poem in any genre unfold in its own terms, in its own way of speaking, and I listen very deeply for each poem’s voice. I know I’m on the right track when the act of writing feels somatically correct (correct in the physical body) and when the world of a poem opens up before me on the page, as if on its own. I write and edit virtually simultaneously, as I go along, so I tend to arrive at final versions of poems fairly quickly, without needing to set drafts aside, then return to them in later sittings. There are a few haiku that have so far refused to work and that I revisit from time to time. But I don’t worry about them. I figure they’ll manifest when the time is right, if they’re meant to.

Could you give us an example of a haiku book that opened up the world of haiku to you?

Richard Gilbert’s The Disjunctive Dragonfly: A New Approach to English-Language Haiku (Red Moon Press, 2008) demonstrated to me that one can write haiku on an artistic par with good contemporary “mainstream” poetry. That book is a seminal critical study of explorative style in English-language haiku (ELH).

You’ve been educating poets about haiku in various ways. For example, you developed poetry-related programs for students in elementary school through college, along with poetry programs for the general public when you were appointed the Inaugural Artist-in-Residence of Bryn Du Mansion in Granville, Ohio, a historical residence with an art center. You’ve also educated haiku poets, in particular, through your essays in haiku journals, and you’ve mentored haikuists through the Haiku Society of America’s Zoom Mentoring Program. Could you describe your work with students and whether you were able to include haiku at any of these levels? What elements of haiku did your workshop participants have trouble grasping? Could you give us two examples of haiku that you introduced to your beginners which you feel exemplify the form?

I am a quite active poet-educator for learners of all ages. As an Ohio Arts Council Teaching Artist, I teach haiku and other genres of poetry across the full age spectrum, including students in primary and secondary school, through a range of classes, workshops, and residency experiences I’ve created. I developed many learning experiences for young students while serving as the inaugural artist-in-residence at historic Bryn Du Mansion (Granville, Ohio) and am constantly creating new educational poetry offerings. Similarly, my work as a teaching artist also reaches adult learners through workshops and classes that I create and implement at the invitation of poetry and community organizations.

As a mentor in the Haiku Society of America’s mentoring program, I led my mentees in monthly Zoom meetings, in which we critiqued the haiku and discussed readings in the critical literature. I will add that my mentees were actually not what I would call “beginners” at haiku. Some had been writing for several years or more. They continue to make significant contributions to ELH and are themselves best qualified to say what they did or did not “have trouble grasping.”

I wish there were more space here to discuss strategies for teaching haiku across the full age spectrum. It’s such a large and rich subject. It could be the focus of an interview of its own!

You have a column appearing in Modern Haiku called “In Other Worlds.” In each column you run a poem by a haiku poet you admire. Could you give us an example of a poem and tell us why you chose it?

First, a bit of backstory and clarification: My column, In Other Worlds, was initially the idea of Paul Miller, the current editor of Modern Haiku. At the 2023 Haiku North America meeting, in San Francisco, Paul invited me to write a regular feature for which, in each installment, I would write about a published haiku in explorative style—what I appreciate about the poem, how I see the poem working, etc. Thus, every installment of In Other Worlds is, by design, an example of a poem and why I chose it, so in response to your question, I would encourage people to read the column.

For those interested in right now getting a feel for explorative haiku style, here are a number of my own explorative haiku—which I categorically exclude from discussion in In Other Worlds—published in Heliosparrow Poetry Journal. Edited and published by Richard Gilbert, this journal is arguably the most important journal still actively publishing explorative haiku.

If you wish to learn more in detail about explorative haiku style, In Other Worlds is actually written just for you. There is a good deal of confusion about how to approach/interpret explorative haiku, or haiku whose ways of speaking are more complex and challenging than those of traditional concrete-realist haiku. In writing In Other Worlds, I offer a range of critical approaches for engaging with and unpacking more complex haiku. The column thus gives readers and poets a whole variety of interpretive tools and creative possibilities for reading and writing explorative haiku.

And for further reading on explorative haiku style, I’d also point you to my Afterword in Haiku 2026: 100 notable ku from 2025 ed. Lee Gurga and Scott Metz (Modern Haiku Press, 2025). Modern Haiku Press’ Haiku 20XX anthology series is a landmark anthology series showcasing some of the most interesting English-language haiku published across the full stylistic range, including explorative haiku. My Afterword offers detailed readings of several example haiku across that broad range of styles.

You’ve published several poetry collections. Your haibun collection Joyride (Red Moon Press, 2022) won the Marianne Bluger Book Award from Haiku Canada. It was also a finalist for the Touchstone Award from The Haiku Foundation. You also won the 2018 HSA Haibun Award Competition with your haibun “That Summer.” Why do you love to write haibun, what are the challenges of writing it, and how do you recommend that haiku poets who are interested in it investigate it?

Haibun is traditionally understood as a hybrid genre consisting of prose and haiku, plus a title for the whole piece. In my view, the essence of haibun in the twenty-first century (and beyond) does not reside in a narrow understanding of the genre as manifesting only as prose, haiku, and title. I prefer, instead, to take a broader, maybe somewhat more conceptual view of the genre and mine the potentialities of its most essential feature, which is its hybridity. We might call this the haibun idea—the idea that haibun’s hybridity is a radical invitation for us to explore virtually any genres or forms in combination with haiku, and see what exciting new things, ideas, and experiences with language emerge from that creativity.

Instead of speaking of contemporary haibun as “haiku + prose” or “haiku prose,” it would be more apt to speak of the genre in terms of its “haiku” and “non-haiku” elements or “parts.” I’ve written haibun whose hybridity manifests as haiku + prose, certainly, but I’ve also written haibun that manifest as haiku + some other genre of writing (for example, prose poem, ghazal, recipe, letter, etc.). When two (or more) distinct genres are brought together in the same haibun, disjunction happens automatically, and the gaps resulting from that disjunction are potential gold mines for rich language experiences.

Another aspect of the haibun idea is that the hybrid play at its essence calls on writers to hone their craft in multiple genres. I appreciate that challenge. More of my thoughts on haibun appear in my essay, “Wandering, Pigeons: New Ways to Approach to Haibun,” first published in Contemporary Haibun Online and anthologized (with a few edits) in the Contemporary Haibun 21 anthology (Red Moon Press, 2026).

A few years ago, you served as the Program Chair of the Haiku North America Conference. One of your projects was to create the world’s first festival of haibun films. How many haibun films were selected, how were the films created, and was there a collaboration between the professional film producers and haibun poets?

I created the Haibun Film Festival at the 2023 Haiku North America meeting, in Cincinnati, as an interdisciplinary initiative to unite the hybrid genre of haibun with the moving image. The project brought the exciting possibilities of video poems into the genre of haibun. Conversely, it resulted in the first video poems inspired by haibun.

All of the details of the Haibun Film Festival, including my introductory remarks to the festival, the list of the ten haibun films that were screened at Haiku North America 2023, and the link at which those films can be viewed, appear at this link.

Your free verse collection, In the High Weeds, won the 2020 Stevens Manuscript Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. Many haiku poets only write Japanese poetic forms. Do you encourage haiku poets to also write longer poetic forms such as free verse. If so, why?

Absolutely. There is a certain sense of safety in writing in a tightly fixed, extremely short form like traditional haiku. There are genre expectations, “rules,” to consider (if not necessarily always follow)—place a kire (cut) between a haiku’s fragment and phrase, perhaps include a seasonal reference, aim for 17 syllables or fewer, etc.—and not many words involved. And while writing a good haiku is not necessarily easy, the “rules” present for us a more or less clear path on which we can persist toward creating a finished haiku.

But writing only haiku, writing only in so tightly circumscribed a form can, I believe, be limiting both for a poet and for haiku as an art form. A poet who writes only haiku may come to rely on the formula as a crutch. As for the art form of haiku, Martin Lucas warned in his now canonical essay “Haiku as Poetic Spell” that haiku can all too easily become formulaic. There is much more to writing a good haiku than having a grasp of formal guidelines and genre expectations. Literary awareness, sensitivity to language, curiosity about how good writing, in general, works—all of these characteristics (and others) are talents a writer can and should bring to bear in writing haiku and in all other types of writing.

Can one develop sensitivity to language by writing only haiku? Certainly. But—and it seems tautological to say—one will develop much greater breadth and depth as a writer the more broadly and deeply one reads and writes. Constantly reading and writing across a wide range of genres and forms will only help writers develop a wide variety of techniques and a richer sensitivity to the nuances of language, and help build awareness of literary genres, forms, practices, and styles. Writers can apply all of these skills to reading and writing haiku. But I think it would be challenging to develop such skills only by reading and writing haiku.

I’ll add that this response is informed by my own experience bringing my work (reading and writing) as an academic writer, a journalist, and a “mainstream” poet to bear on my work in haikai genres. I cannot speak from personal experience to what it might be like to start writing poetry with haiku and to expand into longer forms from there.

You have said that in your book, a silence or two, you “broke the cardinal rules of English-language haiku,” yet you received a Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award for it in 2025, and it was shortlisted for the Touchstone Book Award form The Haiku Foundation. How did you break the rules? And, please give us a sample poem from it.

a silence or two (Red Moon Press, 2024) is a collection of haiku in explorative style and short prose poems. It is also a collection that, from a highly subjective female perspective, deals with trauma, the body, loss, and ultimately healing. I sense a distinct editorial bias against haiku that speak in women’s voices, that reference women’s bodies, and/or that address experiences unique to women. By way of its subject matter, a silence or two resists this bias and “breaks” the implicit “rule” that women’s experience should remain cloistered and silent. Delving into my own subjective experience, the collection also defies the expectation of objectivity so prized among proponents of traditional haiku style, and breaks that rule.

But there is arguably no more divisive issue in English-language haiku today than that of style. There is a distinct bias in the ELH world toward traditional (concrete-realist) haiku, which amounts to a bias against explorative haiku. As a collection featuring explorative haiku, a silence or two breaks rank from traditional haiku style which, in his essay “Haiku as Poetic Spell,” Martin Lucas dubbed (with no intent to flatter) the “internationally accepted formula” of haiku (my emphasis). Lucas also encouraged coloring outside the lines to keep haiku from stagnating in the merely formulaic and, positively speaking, to keep the genre fresh. Many explorative haiku do precisely this in often profoundly interesting ways, yet a bias against the style persists.

It is much to the credit of the judges of the 2025 HSA Merit Book Awards, Scott Mason and Patricia Machmiller, that they read a silence or two with open minds and gave it a fair and thoughtful reading on its own terms. Instead of dismissing the collection for reasons of style or subject matter, they embraced the book’s unique way of speaking. I am grateful for their informed, insightful, and poetically courageous responses to this collection.

I wish there were more space to get into the rich complexities of explorative haiku style. I am always happy to engage with anyone who wishes to know more.

Your question asks for a sample poem from a silence or two. Here is one:

whale fall
my ocean’s quiet
deaths

First Place, inaugural Heliosparrow Haiku Frontier Awards, 2024

Literary criticism is also a part of your work as a poet. You won the Juxta Award for Excellence in Haiku Research and Scholarship, sponsored by The Haiku Foundation. Your winning essay was “Found in Translation: The Kon Nichi Translation Group, Gendai Haiku, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Haiku in English.” Are gendai haiku and avant-garde haiku growing movements?

First, to clarify some terms: Gendai (現代) is a Japanese word that is used to refer to the present day, or contemporary times, or the modern era. In the present day, haiku are written in English across a wide range of styles, from very strictly “traditional” to outright experimental. So, it is now not widely accepted in the English-language haiku realm to use the word gendai to refer to haiku written in English in explorative style, Doing so would be to apply a fairly broad Japanese term in an incorrectly specific way to native English-language haiku. Some have used the term “avant-garde” to refer to explorative haiku, and I used that designation as recently as 2024, in the title of the Juxtapositions essay you referenced. However, I now prefer “explorative” haiku because it is an English—not Japanese—word that clearly articulates a key element of the aesthetics of English-language haiku in this style—namely, that they explore an unlimited range of ideas, imagery, lexical choices, and form beyond those typical of traditional concrete-realist haiku. “Explorative” also avoids the potentially too-specific understanding of the loan word “avant-garde” as referring only to a particular avant-garde artistic movement, in either Western or Japanese historical and/or cultural contexts.

Yes, I would say that interest in explorative haiku is growing, deepening, and ripening. The most compelling indications are the extraordinary published explorative haiku and criticism by a number of writers who have broken exciting new ground in how language can articulate and embody rich and extraordinary interior worlds beyond those experienced through sensations of the concrete. The continued prevalence of extremely interesting, emotionally and intellectually compelling, and imagistically fresh haiku; poems that stop readers in their tracks, energize them, challenge them to expand their thinking and use language in novel ways; and poems that create a steady stream of new expressive possibilities keep English-language haiku fresh. These haiku are expansive expressions of originality and creativity and bode well for the future of haiku as a body of English-language literature.

The readers of this interview will most likely be intrigued to hear about your writing of commissioned poetry in collaboration with musicians who perform at notable concerts. You served as Poet Laureate for the 75^th Anniversary Season of the Chamber Music Columbus Concert Series. You wrote a poem for each concert. How many poems did you write, and how challenging was this?

The 75^th anniversary season of the Chamber Music Columbus concert series (2022-23) unfolded in seven concerts, each featuring a performance by a different world-class visiting chamber music ensemble. Chamber music is the term for an intimate ensemble of around 3-12 classical musicians, and the performers on this series are truly some of the finest classical musicians in the world. I wrote a longer free verse poem for each of the seven concerts on the series and performed a different one of the poems to introduce each concert. I united my poems conceptually around the idea of the elements, or raw materials, of chamber music—wood, metal, air, hands, beginnings and endings, time, and space: the wood and metal of musical instruments, the air essential to singing and playing wind instruments (and to life itself), the hands that draw bows across strings or press keys and valves, how music emerges from and returns to untold depths within us, the time in which music and our experiences of it unfold, and the physical space in which every note played or sung finds an acoustical home that enables this intimate type of music to resonate (literally and figuratively) among us. These musical elements served as guiding metaphors in my poems.

The commission from Chamber Music Columbus was not the first poetry commission I had fulfilled, so the challenge of writing this series of poems was inspiring, not daunting. I thoroughly enjoyed creating the overarching theme for the series and fleshing out different aspects of the theme in each poem. Again, since, for me, writing poetry is making music with words, it felt quite natural to write this series of poems to introduce the work of some of the finest classical musicians on the international stage.

Are you currently working on another haiku book and/or do you have any special haiku projects planned for the near future?

I am working on several manuscripts, in haiku, haibun, mainstream “lyric” poetry, and criticism. I always have many projects on the docket.

Thank you for the pleasure of this interview, Jennifer.

Thank you so much, Charlotte. And thank you for all you do for haiku and for poets.

Interviewer Charlotte Digregorio, a retired professor of languages and writing, is the author of nine books, including: Wondrous Instruction and Advice from Global Poets: How to Write and Publish Moving Poems and Books and Publicize Like a Pro (with a large section on haiku/ senryu/ tanka); Haiku and Senryu: A Simple Guide for All; Ripples of Air: Poems of Healing; and six other award-winning books. She writes seventeen poetic forms, has won eighty-four poetry awards, and was nominated for four Pushcart Prizes. She was honored by the Governor of Illinois for her decades of achievements in the literary arts.  Digregorio translates poetry books from Italian into English. Her traveling, illustrated poetry show has been featured at numerous U.S. libraries, including the Chicago Public Library, and hospitals, convention centers, restaurants, park districts, and museums/galleries. She is a writer-in-residence at universities; judges international writing contests; and teaches poetry in the public schools. She produced/hosted a radio poetry program on public broadcasting, and was Second Vice President of the Haiku Society of America. Her top-ranked poetry blog, www.charlottedigregorio.wordpress.com, features the work of writers from sixty-one countries with The Daily Haiku. In 2014, she authored Haiku and Senryu: A Simple Guide for All, recognized for its effective, basic haiku instruction. Her award-winning titles include two Writer’s Digest Book Club Featured Selections. Many of her trade books are adopted as university texts and supplemental texts.

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