Poet Profile

Linda Papanicolaou

A middle school art teacher and art historian, Linda became interested in haiku and haiga in the late 1990s when she taught a 5th grade art lesson that combined leaf printing and haiku. The leaf prints were beautiful, the haiku not, and she realized she'd have to learn more about haiku if she ever wanted to teach that lesson again. She began by browsing resources on the Internet and soon found the World Haiku Club's Beginners' group, then led by an'ya. She is now a member of the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, Haiku Poets of Northern California, and the Haiku Society of America. For the past ten years she has edited <i>Haigaonline </i>and has been involved with <i>World Haiku Review</i>, <i>Modern Haiga</i>, and a couple of chapbooks in HPNC's Two Autumns series. For Linda, haiku is a way of seeing, informed by her interest in art. At Yuki Teikei, Patricia Machmiller and Jerry Ball have been major influences on her writing, in particularly in using of season as a window into the emotion of the poem. But she also likes experimental text/image linking, and indeed other linked forms such as haibun, tanka prose, renku and rengay. In 2013 she served as co-judge with Norman Darlington for HSA's 2013 Lionel Einbond Renku Contest, presented Memorials at the 2013 Haiku North America Conference, was a featured reader at YT's 2014 Tea House gathering, and read in HPNC's Two Autumns series (<i>The Half-Finished Bridge</i>, ed. David Grayson, 2014). Her art and poetry have appeared in <i>Amaze, Autumn Leaves, Cattails, Contemporary Haibun Online, Daily Haiga, Fire Pearls, Frogpond, Geppo, Haigaonline, The Heron’s Nest, Ink Sweat & Tears, Journal of Renga & Renku, Lynx, Mariposa, Modern English Tanka, Moonbathing, Moonset, Nisqually Delta Review, Notes from the Gean, Ribbons, Santa Fe Broadside, Simply Haiku, Sketchbook, Soundings, Temps Libres, WHC World Kigo Project</i> and <i>World Haiku Review</i>.

Awards and Other Honors: First Place, Haiku Poets of Northern California Rengay Contest (2008) for “Rainbow Lorikeets” with Kathy Earsman and Colin Stewart Jones; Honorable Mention, Haiku Poets of Northern California Rengay Contest (2009) for "Concoctions I", a bilingual rengay with Sprite (Claire Chatelet); Third Place, Haiku Poets of Northern California Rengay Contest (2011) for "At the Edge" with Sprite (Claire Chatelet); First Place, <i>Journal of Renga and Renku</i> Shisan Contest (2011) for "Chimney Cracks / Cheminée Fissurée", a bilingual shisan with Sprite (Claire Chatelet); and Kiyoshi and Kiyoko Tokutomi Haiku Contest (Honorable Mention, 2012 and 2013; First Place, 2014).

bright spring morning—
the school bus driver 
in his shirtsleeves

here 
then not
newt

pickleweed—
the salt marsh harvest mouse
about its business

morning solitude
on a rippling mountain stream
two fly fishermen

dune wind—
the blackened seedpods
of bush lupine

the deep purple gloss 
on the skin of an eggplant—
my straw shopping bag

Credits: "bright spring morning" - <i>Bending Reeds</i>, ed. Machmiller, Members Anthology, (Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, 2012); "pickleweed"- <i>Mariposa</i> (2006); "dune wind" - Kukai winner, Yuki Teikei Retreat, Asilomar (2009); in Tracy Koretsky, "Understanding English-Language Haiku," <i>Winning Writers Newsletter </i>(April 2010); archived, New Zealand Poetry Society (July 2010); "here" - <i>San Francisco Bay Area Nature Guide And Saijiki</i>, eds. Ann Homan, Patrick Gallagher and Patricia Machmiller (Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, 2010); "morning solitude" - First Place, Kiyoshi and Kiyoko Tokutomi Haiku Contest (2014), Yuki Teikei Haiku Society (2015); "the deep purple gloss" - Japan Cultural Fair Haiku Contest, Santa Cruz California; Second Place in the First Adult contest (Geppo, 2011).