Self-portrait
John Zheng (born Zheng Jianqing, Chinese: 鄭漸清, June 23, 1958, Qingshan, Hubei, China), American professor and chair of the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Mississippi Valley State University, Itta Bena, Miss.; researcher, translator, writer, and editor on African American haiku; and haiku poet. He came out with four chapbooks of original haiku and found haiku in 2006–2008 and a collection of haibun and tanka prose, A Way of Looking (winner of the 2019 Gerald Cable Book Award), among others. Zheng has published more than 40 articles, reviews, and interviews about haiku as well as edited scholarly books on Richard Wright, Sonia Sanchez, and African American haiku generally. He was founding editor of the print and Web journal Haiku Page (2008) and three other literary magazines. He has lived in Itta Bena, Miss., since 1996.
Note: This is an abstract of a longer biographical article to come.