About Us     

Margaret Chula is a poet, teacher and performer living in Portland, Oregon. She has published five collections of poetry: Grinding my ink; This Moment; Shadow Lines (with Rich Youmans); Always Filling, Always Full; and The Smell of Rust. Her tanka have been included in The Tanka Anthology, Wind Five Folded: Full Moon Tide: and Appetite: Food as Metaphor, An Anthology of Women Poets, along with poets Jane Hirshfield and Maxine Kumin. From 1980-1992, she taught creative writing at universities in Kyoto, Japan. Since her return to the U.S., she has given poetry workshops for arts organizations, universities and Zen centers. In her performances and exhibitions, she has collaborated with musicians, artists, dancers and most recently a quilt artist. Their book of quilts and poetry, What Remains: Japanese Americans in Internment camps, will be published in 2007.

Tom Clausen  Born in 1951 in Ithaca, New York., Tom lives in the same house he grew up in just outside of Ithaca with his wife, Berta Gutierrez and children, Casey and Emma. . He works at Cornell University in the Access Services department at A.R. Mann Library. Tom has had two collections of tanka published; A Work of Love ( 1997- Tiny Poems Press) and Growing Late ( 2006- Snapshot Press). Web site:  http://home.earthlink.net/~tclausen/

Jeanne Emrich, webmistress of Tanka Online, is a poet and artist living in Edina, Minnesota. She has taught haiku, tanka, and haiga at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is a past vice-president of the Tanka Society of America and the editor of Reeds: Contemporary Haiga (2003--present), a publication of Lone Egret Press, the online version of which may be seen at http://www.reedscontemporaryhaiga.com. Her tanka have been performed in dance and choral productions. Her first collection of tanka, The Pleiades at Dawn (Edina, Minnesota, Lone Egret Press, 2007) was released in January, 2007.

Amelia Fielden, born in Sydney, Australia, is a professional Japanese translator and a multi-award winning writer of English language tanka, whose years are now divided among her homes on the Pacific coast, the inland capital of Canberra, and Seattle, Washington. To date she has translated, or co-authored, fourteen collections of tanka by contemporary Japanese female poets. In 2008 Amelia and her co-translator, Kozue Uzawa, also received the Donald Keene Prize for Translation of Japanese Literature for their production of the book Ferris Wheel : 101 Modern and Contemporary Japanese Tanka. Five volumes of Amelia’s own poetry and tanka have been published. The most recent is Baubles, Bangles & Beads (2007), a collection of 444 tanka 'threaded' onto 40 themes. Published in September, 2008 was In Two Minds, a book of tanka written responsively between Amelia and another Australian poet, Kathy Kituai. Amelia travels frequently to Japan, which has been a major influence on her life and work for over 40 years.

Mariko Kitakubo was born in Tokyo and continues to reside there.  Her tanka books include: I Want to Tell You in the Words of Waves (1999, Artland) When the Music Stops (2002, Nagarami Syobo) Will (2005,Kadokawa Shoten) On This Same Star (2006,Kadokawa Shoten), and Cicada Forest (2008, Kadokawa Shoten).  Other tanka-related activities include reading performances and an exhibition in collaboration with a photographer. Visit her online at: http://tanka.kitakubo.com/english/ 

Michael McClintock resides in California, alternating his home between Fresno in the central San Joaquin Valley, South Pasadena, and Los Angeles. A discussion of his poetry, critical theory and practice in tanka, haiku, haibun and related poetry ,may be found in Barbara Ungar's book, Haiku in English, Stanford University (Stanford Honors Essay in the Humanities, No. XXI, copyright 1978, Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University).  His recent publications include The Tanka Anthology (Red Moon Press, 2003); Letters in Time: Sixty Short Poems (Hermitage West, 2005), and The Five-Hole Flute: an anthology of modern tanka in sets and sequences, edited by Denis M. Garrison and Michael McClintock (Modern English Tanka Press, 2006). He is president of the Tanka Society of America and writes and edits "The Tanka Cafe" for Ribbons: Journal of the Tanka Society of America.



 

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