─ bio
─
Thomas Heffernan grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in North
Carolina.
His interest in haiku increased during years he lived in Japan, where
he co-edited the bilingual haiku magazine Plover/Chidori.
He was named ten times in the Mainichi annual list of best
English-language haiku published in that paper, and was awarded other
Mainichi, Itoen and Japan Air Lines (JAL) citations for haiku. In 2006
he received the Kusamakura Grand Prize trip to Japan.
Thomas's publications include the haiku chapbook White Edge, Curling
Wave and the book Christmas Gifts in South Japan, a collection of
haibun, haiku essays. A number of haiku are interleaved among the poems
in his Gathering In Ireland. His monograph on another miniature form,
the seventeenth-century emblem, was published in Japan under the title
Art and Emblem. Earlier on, his Liam Poems, about the Heffernan who
named Ireland Cathleen ni Houlihan, received North Carolina's
Roanoke-Chowan Award.