Photo by Yu Chang
Paul MacNeil (born Paul W. MacNeil, January 7, 1948, Lowell, Massachusetts, U.S.A.; died October 30, 2019, Denver, Colorado), retired banker and music store proprietor, self-proclaimed amateur naturalist, and haiku and renku poet. His haiku were published widely in journals and anthologies, and he served as an associate editor of the journal The Heron’s Nest, 2000–2019. He was especially interested in renku, and his work in that genre won five Grand Prizes and nine other awards in the Haiku Society of America’s Bernard Einbond Renku Contest. From his childhood, MacNeil was enchanted by the Northwoods of Maine, and he continued to spend as much time as possible at his camp on Lake Onawa, in recent years hosting a gathering of haiku friends there every summer. A collection of their work was published as The Onawa Poems, 1999–2008. MacNeil last resided in Ocala, Florida.
Note: This is an abstract of a longer biographical article to come.