Photo by Rita Rickert
Bryan Rickert (born Bryan Charles Rickert, December 11, 1972, Belleville, Illinois, U.S.A.), American haiku poet and editor, retired after 15 years of teaching in urban schools and now working as an industrial coffee roaster. With degrees in art and education from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville he has been studying and writing Japanese short-form poetry since 2012. In addition to the major haiku and senryu journals, Rickert’s work may be found in anthologies including Lee Gurga and Scott Metz’s Haiku 2020, Jim Kacian and Julie Schwerin’s A New Resonance 12: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku (2021), Jacqueline Pearce’s Last Train Home, and two of the compendia of zodiac animal-related haiku by Corine Timmer. He also has two books to his credit: a collection of haiku, Fish Kite (2018), and Just Dust and Stone (2021) a volume of collaborative split haiku sequences with Peter Jastermsky. Rickert has been the editor of the Living Senryū Anthology since 2018 and coeditor of Failed Haiku—A Journal of English Language Senryu since 2020. He currently resides in Belleville, Illinois.
Note: This is an abstract of a longer biographical article to come.