William J. Higginson(Hian)was born in New York City in 1938, grew up there and in northern New Jersey, with strong ties to his parents' home town of Middletown, Connecticut. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied Japanese at Yale University, and served in the US Air Force at Misawa Air Base, Aomori-ken in the early 1960s. His interest in haiku began at Yale, and resulted in his writing award-winning poems in the genre and editing Haiku Magazine in the 1960s and 1970s. Today he is known primarily as the author of such books as The Haiku Handbook , The Haiku Seasons, and Haiku World . He is a past president of the Haiku Society of America and a member of the Selection Committee for the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Awards sponsored by Ehime Prefecture. After more than a decade based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he and his wife, the poet Penny Harter, now live in Summit, New Jersey.

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wet snow——
another color or two
on the sycamore boughs

yuki toke te suzukake no eda iro madara ( tr. by YOSHIMURA Ikuyo )

bend after bend
hill after hill folds into
Mogamigawa
yamahida wo ire tsuzuraore mogamigawa ( tr. by KATO Koko)

holding the water,
held by it——
the dark mud
mizu wo mochi mizu ni motareru kurai doro ( tr. by SATO Hiroaki )

from the sandy beach
I stumble into the dark
path fireflies
hamabe kara hotaru no yami ni fumikominu ( tr. by KONDO Shokan )

Good Friday
just out of tree shadow
the white hyacinth
junanbi ya kokage dete shiroki fuhshinshi ( tr. by KONDO Shokan )