slow afternoon
hillside pines gathering
the last light
Catherine J.S. Lee lives, writes, teaches, and gardens on an island on the remote coast of Maine near Canada. She has been writing ever since she first acquired written language at the age of six. Before that, she remembers telling herself stories and making up and reciting rhymes. Her first published story appeared in Maine’s largest Sunday newspaper when she was eight years old, and she was immediately hooked on seeing her words in print.
A teenage poet and a fiction writer for most of her adult life, Catherine saw her short stories published in a variety of print and online journals during the 1980’s, 1990’s, and 2000’s. She began her haiku journey in the summer of 2007 when she was writing fictional prose poems and discovered the haibun form. On advice from a haibun editor, she joined an online haiku workshop to improve her skills, discovered the joys of writing haiku, and never looked back.
Her haiku and senryu have been published in haiku journals around the world, including Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest, Acorn, Shamrock, Notes From the Gean, Chrysanthemum, Mango Moons, and Asahi Weekly. She was a featured poet for spring and summer 2009 at DailyHaiku, and appears in A New Resonance 7: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku (Red Moon Press, 2011). She has recently returned to writing haibun and has begun to create haiga, which she finds highly addictive.
Catherine’s haiku have done well in a variety of contests, including 2011’s Robert Spiess Memorial Haiku Awards in which she took first place and also honorable mention. All That Remains, her haiku chapbook, was the winner of the 2010 Turtle Light Press Haiku Chapbook Competition and was released in April, 2011: