Fire in the Treetops: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Haiku North America

The biennial Haiku North America conference celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary with Fire in the Treetops. This anthology assembles all the haiku and senryu published in previous conference anthologies. An extensive introduction by editor Michael Dylan Welch explores the history and future of the conference, and short essays by thirteen contributors feature poems selected from each conference. Christopher Patchel provides linocut artwork. The art of haiku is mature and popular in the English language. If the existence and success of the biennial Haiku North America conferences do not sufficiently attest to this, now comes additional proof. Fire in the Treetops compiles more than a thousand haiku and senryu from all thirteen HNA anthologies from 1991 to 2015, a time when poets were stretching their wings, shaking off the restraints of Japanese traditions, and exploring new, individual approaches to this historical poetic genre. The poets whose work appears here comprise a veritable who’s who of English-language haiku. I can hardly think of a single prominent North American haiku poet whose name cannot be found here. Fire in the Treetops chronicles the florescence of North American haiku and we might well consider the index of poets to be its pantheon. Michael Dylan Welch has done an enormous service for the North American haiku community. -Charles Trumbull, editor emeritus, Modern Haiku, and past president, Haiku Society of America

Haiku North America is probably the most ambitious haiku event ever attempted outside of Japan. Everyone taking part in this coming-of-age celebration for English-language haiku will be helping to make literary history. -Cor van den Heuvel, on the back cover of the first HNA conference anthology, Harvest