Photo by Frank Williams
Dee Evetts (born James William Evetts, May 16, 1943, Ware, Hertfordshire, England). He briefly attended Cambridge University before traveling widely, first as a language teacher, subsequently as a carpenter and cabinetmaker, and later as a bookbinder specializing in protective enclosures for books and rare documents. Evetts cofounded the British Haiku Society with David Cobb in 1990. He started the Spring Street Haiku Group in New York City in 1992, curated the Haiku on Forty-Second Street installation for the City of New York in 1995, and served as secretary for the Haiku Society of America from 1996 through 1998. He was a subeditor for the annual Red Moon anthologies and coeditor, with Jim Kacian, of the New Resonance anthology series during its early years. Evetts has published three collections of haiku and senryu: A Small Ceremony (1987), endgrain (1995), and Home After Dark (2002). He currently writes for the online publication tsuri-dōrō—a small journal of haiku and senryū and for the The Haiku Foundation’s blog Troutswirl. He has gained awards and honorable mentions in the Haiku Society of America’s Harold G. Henderson and Gerald M. Brady contests, the Kaji Aso Studio’s International Haiku Contest, the World Haiku Contest (Yamagata, Japan), the Welsh Academy International Haiku Competition (1991), the 2nd International Tanka Contest (Poetry Nippon), and the HSA Merit Book Awards. Evetts lived in New York City from 1991 to 2002, and then in Virginia until his return to the U.K. in 2019. He lives in Cambridge, England, where he writes and works, again as a carpenter.
Note: This is an abstract of a longer biographical article to come.