Join editors Susan Antolin, Garry Gay, and Carolyn Hall for a celebration of San Francisco Bay Area haiku featuring a coterie of local poets reading their work from The San Francisco Haiku Anthology, Volume Two. With Kerouac Alley as a fitting backdrop, this event brings the American Haiku Movement full circle in a return to the streets of North Beach where Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others first experimented with English-language haiku. This anthology contains Snyder’s work along with poems by 91 other outstanding poets who have continued on the innovative path the Beat Poets forged.
Come delight with us in the ways haiku are more than a way of writing—they are a way of being in the world with humility, humor, and, above all, a sense of wonder.
The San Francisco Haiku Anthology, Volume Two showcases the work of the most acclaimed haiku poets writing in and about the San Francisco Bay Area over the past thirty years. The more than 700 haiku represent a diversity of style and subject matter but are unified in their spareness, concision, and ability to reveal the extraordinary in the everyday world.
Susan Antolin (she/her) fell in love with modern Japanese poetry while living in Japan in the late 1980s. She is the author of two haiku collections and a co-editor of The San Francisco Haiku Anthology, Volume Two. She has served as the newsletter editor for the Haiku Society of America; newsletter editor and past president of the Haiku Poets of Northern California; a frequent judge of haiku contests; and the editor of Acorn: A Journal of Contemporary Haiku. She also operates the small independent publishing company Spare Poems Press.
Garry Gay is the president of the Haiku Poets of Northern California. He is a past president of The Haiku Society of America. He founded Haiku North America, a biennial haiku conference. In 1995 he co-founded the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library in Sacramento, California. He is the creator of the poetic form called Rengay. He is a professional photographer.
Carolyn Hall was introduced to haiku in 1999 and has been writing this short form for the past 27 years. Her poems have been widely published in haiku journals in the U.S. and abroad, and have been anthologized in A New Resonance 2: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku (Red Moon Press), The New Haiku (Snapshot Press), Montage (The Haiku Foundation), Nest Feathers (The Heron’s Nest), Haiku 2016, 2020, and 2022 (Modern Haiku Press), and Haiku In English: the First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton & Company). Hall was editor of Acorn, a journal of contemporary haiku, and editor of Mariposa, the journal of the Haiku Poets of Northern California. Since 2006 she has authored nine award-winning haiku collections. In 2024 she co-edited The San Francisco Haiku Anthology, Volume 2 with Susan Antolin and Garry Gay. When not putting pen to paper, she is a mixed media collage artist. She lives in Santa Rosa CA with her husband.
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation