the haiku circle

Wanda Cook: 2015 Guest Reader

Wanda Cook has been a member of the Haiku Society of America since 1991 and began writing haiku in 1995. She has served as an organizer of an HSA Quarterly Meeting, the coordinator for the Winfred Press Tanka Calendar Contests, a judge for the Robert Spiess Haiku Competition and one of the organizers of the annual Haiku Circle event in Massachusetts. She regularly gives haiku presentations and readings in the Pioneer Valley and in 2011 was on the program for Haiku North America in Seattle, Washington.

Wanda edited flower of another country, the 2007 HSA Members' Anthology, as well a Nami, an anniversary anthology for the Haiku Poets' Society of Western Massachusetts. She has served as the coordinator of HPSWM since 2000 and since January 2011 has served as the New England Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America. In the capacity of an HSA coordinator she publishes a monthly newsletter, New England Letters, which is distributed to well over 100 members in New England as well as neighboring states.

As an award winning poet, Wanda's work has appeared in both print and online journals as well as many juried anthologies.She has been the featured poet on the Electronic Poetry Network in Shreveport, Louisiana as well as poet of the month on the Mann Library Daily Haiku site at Cornell University. The Haiku Foundation recently selected her chapbook, apres bath, as book of the week. Wanda has published numerous haiku chapbooks and broadsides and a chapbook of her western poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Award. Her debut haiku book, winter pruning, was published by Stark Mountain Press in 2014. _