Poet Profile

Judith Hishikawa

As a child we wintered in New Jersey and summered in Vermont. I went to high school and college there. I consider myself to be more a Vermonter than anything else. After college, I went to Japan to teach English as a Foreign Language, married, raised four children. I came back and taught English as a Second Language and Japanese Bilingual in the Fort Lee Public Schools. After I retired, I moved back to Vermont and lived in a log cabin in the northern woods for eight years. I started writing haiku in earnest. When I moved to Astoria to be near family, I used my writing skills and attention to the nature around me to adjust to urban living. I self-published a chapbook in Vermont and have recently used my stipend money to self-publish a chapbook, Wild Asters.

Awards and Other Honors:

The Poetry Society of Vermont’s Goldstein Memorial Prize, Honorable Mention for Zen Gardens, in 2015, and First Prize in the PSOV’s fall workshop for The Hunger Next Door, in 2017.

Books Published:

retired schoolteacher
still pulling red pens
out of her purse

county fair Ferris wheel
end of august sunsets
over and over

growing up bare foot
exposed to the elements
my sensitive soles

in the afterglow
that almost liquid state
harvest moon

city ants
in and out of
cement cracks

on my head now
grandmother’s soft curls
September sky