Photo by Paul Prefontaine
Joan Prefontaine (born Joan Lisabeth Wolf, September 24, 1949, Saint Cloud, Minnesota, U.S.A.), American writer, poet, teacher, and editor. Since 2012 her haiku, haibun, and haiga have been published widely in journals and anthologies, most recently in Robert Epstein’s The Helping Hand Haiku Anthology and Scott Mason’s Gratitude in the Time of COVID-19: The Haiku Hecameron (both 2020). Her haibun have won honors in major national and international contests, including the Modern Haiku Award for Favorite Haibun in 2017, 1st Place in the 2019 United Haiku and Tanka Society Samurai Contest, and an An (Cottage) Prize in the 2020 Genjuan International Haibun Contest. She served as guest editor for the online Drifting Sands—A Journal of Haibun and Tanka Prose in the spring of 2021. Prefontaine has lived in Cottonwood, in the Verde Valley of central Arizona, since 2004.
Note: This is an abstract of a longer biographical article to come.