James Schlett is an award-winning author, poet and journalist. His first collection of poetry is children & bubbles: Haiku on Fatherhood (Red Moon Press, 2023). He is also the author of two historical narratives: A Not Too Greatly Changed Eden: The Story of the Philosophers’ Camp in the Adirondacks (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015) and Frontier Struggles: Rollo May and the Little Band of New York Psychologists Who Saved Humanism (University of Akron Press, 2021). Frontier Struggles was named one of the Outstanding Academic Titles of 2022 by the American Library Association. A Not Too Greatly Changed Eden received an Adirondack Literary Award as the 2015 Best Book of Nonfiction. His essays have been published in History of Psychology, Songs of Innocence, New York Archives and the Mid-Atlantic Almanack. His haiku have been published in The Heron’s Nest, Acorn, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Stardust, Wild Plum, Under the Basho and bottle rockets.

James has been writing haiku since 2010, following a years-long journey through ever-shortening forms of poetry: English lyric, free verse, Tang Dynasty Chinese, Japanese tanka. The American transcendentalists and existentialists influenced his prose and much as his poems. In a journal entry, he wrote, “I have always striven to write poetry in such a way where what I feel blends into a landscape, as though it is impossible to tell where my life ends and the world begins. I write as though I am trying to vanish in God.” James believes the haiku moment guides us. Each poem is like a star in the night sky and some can be strewn together to form a constellation that tells a story: the self. As he says in children and bubbles, “Our moments are our stars and our stories are our constellations. The stories are what help us find our bearing and the stars, what guide us.”