Michael Dylan Welch is a poet and editor who lives near Seattle, Washington. He grew up in England (where he's from), and in Ghana, Australia, and Canada, and has published his poems in hundreds of journals and anthologies in more than fifteen languages. He is poet laureate for Redmond, Washington, founder of National Haiku Writing Month (www.nahaiwrimo.com), director of the Seabeck Haiku Getaway, a longtime officer of the Haiku Society of America, cofounder of the American Haiku Archives and the Haiku North America conference, and founder and first president of the Tanka Society of America. He edited the journal Woodnotes from 1989 to 1997, followed by Tundra: The Journal of the Short Poem. He has published dozens of books and anthologies, mostly poetry, including books translated from the Japanese. In 2012, a poem he cotranslated from the Japanese with Emiko Miyashita, from their book Hyakunin Isshu - 100 Poets: Passion of the Imperial Court, appeared on the back of 150,000,000 United States postage stamps. In 2013, he was the keynote speaker for the annual Haiku International Association conference in Tokyo. Michael's personal website, devoted mostly to haiku, tanka, and other poetry, including hundreds of essays and reviews, is www.graceguts.com. His favourite quotation about haiku is by Roland Barthes, who said, "haiku has this rather fantasmagorical property: that we always suppose we ourselves can write such things easily."