Self-portrait
Abigail Friedman (born Abigail Friedman, July 9, 1956, Washington, D.C., U.S.A.), retired American diplomat and national security official and prize-winning poet composing haiku in English, French, and Japanese. She began her study of haiku in 2001 while posted in Japan. At the time, she was the only non-Japanese member of a haiku group led by haiku master Momoko Kuroda (1938–2023). She founded the first bilingual French/English haiku group in Quebec City and the Supernova haiku group in the D.C. area, where she has been a judge of the Golden Haiku Contest since 2014. Friedman is the author of The Haiku Apprentice: Memoirs of Writing Poetry in Japan (2006); I Wait for the Moon: 100 Haiku of Momoko Kuroda (translations with commentary, 2014); and Street Chatter Fading (2015), a letterpress edition of her own haiku, as well as a contributor to many anthologies. She resides in Washington, D.C., where she is an international consultant, senior advisor to The Asia Foundation, and member of the board of the Japan-America Society of Washington, DC.
Note: This is an abstract of a longer biographical article to come