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Jerome Cushman (born Jerome Jon Cushman, May 31, 1939, Platteville, Wisconsin, U.S.A.), teacher of theater, dance, and English at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) of the Rochester Institute of Technology (1974–2003) and director of a professional theatrical touring company for the hearing-impaired. In 1963 Cushman recognized the compatibility of American Sign Language (ASL) to the teaching of haiku, and in 2000 he originated the Robert F. Panara Haiku Contest for students at NTID and the Tsukuba College of Technology in Japan. He has presented haiku in ASL at the Cradle of American Haiku series of haiku festivals (of which he is a cofounder) in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, several Haiku North America conferences, and the 2007 Haiku Pacific Rim Conference in Matsuyama, Japan. Cushman is an active member of the Haiku Society of America. He helped to establish the Rochester Area Haiku Group in 2004. A collection of Cushman’s haiku, Amidst, was published in 2007, and an unpublished biography of Murikami Kijō (村上鬼城), a deaf haiku poet, was completed in 2011. Cushman lives in Victor, New York, and Mineral Point, Wisconsin.
Note: This is an abstract of a longer biographical article to come.