Poet Profile

Mary Stevens

Member of the Broadmoor Haiku Collective, the Route 9 Haiku Group, and Haiku Poets of the Garden State, Mary Stevens’ work has appeared in Upstate Dim Sum since 2021. She judged the 2024 Peggy Willis Lyles Awards competition, co-judged the 2013 Nicholas Virgilio Haiku Contest, and presented on wabi sabi at Haiku North America (2015). Her haiku have been anthologized in such collections as A New Resonance 12 (2021) and The Wonder Code (2017), and she was featured poet on Cornell University’s Mann Library Daily Haiku Page in December 2020. A former lecturer at the State University of New York at New Paltz, she is currently a book indexer living in the Hudson Valley, NY.

Awards and Other Honors:

Mary won the 2022 Museum of Haiku Literature Award for Best of Issue in Frogpond, first place in the 2020 Harold G. Henderson Memorial Awards, and second place in the 2020 Peggy Willis Lyles Awards.

Books Published:

enough light (Red Moon Press, 2023).

Articles Published: “The Cicada’s Voice: How Wabi Sabi Can Teach Us How to Live” (The Haiku Foundation, 2015).

the heft
of a cast-iron skillet
autumn deepens

a turn of stars
the girl with the hula hoop
keeps it going

late swim
the pregnant woman
dries her belly first

makeup counter
all the shades
of white women

autumn sky
the paint worn thin
around the birdhouse door

the woman inside the man in a dress

Credits:

”the heft” - Harold G. Henderson Haiku Awards (2020); “a turn of stars” - Peggy Willis Lyles Haiku Awards (2020); “late swim” – Frogpond vol. 32:3, Autumn 2009; “makeup counter” – Modern Haiku vol. 50.1, Winter Spring 2019; “autumn sky” – The Heron’s Nest vol. XIII, No. 4: Dec. 2011; “the woman inside” – Frogpond vol. 43.1 Winter 2020.