Poet Profile

William M. Ramsey

Attended Bates College (Maine) and University of North Carolina. Now retired, taught English in South Carolina. Other poetry has appeared in Chiron Review, Christian Century, Commonweal, Cumberland Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and others.

Awards and Other Honors: Honorable Mention (haiku), Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards for This Wine (Deep North Press, 2002); First Place (haibun), Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards for Ascend with Care (Leap Press, 2003); First Place, still Haiku Competition (spring 1998) for "the dead boy" [published in still 2:2 (1998)]; some best-of-issue and runner-up awards for haiku and haibun.

Books Published: This Wine [haiku] (Deep North Press, 2002); Ascend with Care [haibun] (Leap Press, 2003); More Wine [haiku] (Red Moon Press, 2010).

the dead boy
on a Rwandan road
as i eat shrimp

   confronting the dark
a firefly
   illumines its guts

the wheat field
walking into it
i shrink

   veering out of fog
into fog
   a gull’s life

slave cemetery
i scrape the moss to find
no name

    harvest moon
my ashes
   still wrapped in flesh

Credits: "the dead boy" - First Place, still Haiku Competition (spring 1998); still 2.2 (1998); "the wheat field" - Heron Quarterly 2.3 (1998); "slave cemetery" - South by Southeast 3.1 (1996); "confronting the dark" - South by Southeast 16.3 (2000); "veering out of fog" - Presence 39 (2009); "harvest moon" - South by Southeast 6.2 (1999).