Self-portrait
Michele Root-Bernstein (born Michele Marie Root, February 13, 1953, Washington, D.C., U.S.A.). Trained as an historian, she spent twenty-five years as an independent scholar researching and writing in creativity studies. Simultaneously, her haiku, haibun and rengay have appeared widely and won first or second place multiple times in prominent contests. Root-Bernstein has served as coeditor of Frogpond (2012–2015); as book review editor for Modern Haiku (2019–2022); and as founder and facilitator of the Michigan-based Evergreen Haiku Study Group (2017–2024). The Haiku Life, What We Learned as Editors of Frogpond (2017), coauthored with Francine Banwarth, won Honorable Mention in the HSA Merit Book Awards. Her e-chapbook, Wind Rose (2021) won an Honorable Mention. A full-length collection, Plainsong, won the Snapshot Press Book Award in 2022. Root-Bernstein has also written more than a dozen haikai essays, interviews, introductions, and afterwords. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan.
Note: This is an abstract of a longer biographical article to come.