Alexis Rotella

About Alexis Rotella

Known for her blunt, honest language, Rotella has been writing Japanese poetry forms in English since 1979. A prolific writer, she has author dozens of books, is a past president of the Haiku Society of America and was editor of its house organ, Frogpond. She founded several journals, including the on-line Prune Juice Senryu. Her work has been anthologized in scores of venues including The Haiku Anthology (Cor van den Heuvel, Norton), Haiku Mind, Beneath a Single Moon (Shambhala), Talking to the Sun (Henry Holt), and Teaching with Heart (Jossey-Bass). Several of her haiku were translated into Polish by Czeslaw Milosz. Her two latest offerings, Unsealing Our Secrets: A Short Poem Anthology About Sexual Abuse: Women and Men Speak Out: #MeToo and Scratches on the Moon: A Haibun Collection received Touchstone Distinguished Book Awards (2018, 2019, respectively).

Alexis Rotella’s poetry, says poet/scholar Michael McClintock, “is the master of an American diction that is clear, direct and . . . gleefully laconic . . . . It takes a poet to make us hear the unspoken and feel its weight, and to experience the almost mystic osmosis of the whole thought and the emotions associated with and attendant to it, arising scent-like from the words on the page. Rotella is not a demanding poet but a lucid one.” (Lip Prints, Modern English Tanka Press, 2007).

A 2007 Grand Prize Winner of the Kusumakura International Haiku Contest, she traveled to Kumamoto, Japan to receive the award. She also served for three years as judge for the Ito-En Haiku Grand Prize (English Division).

Rotella is the 23rd honorary curator to be recognized by the American Haiku Archives (California).