Self-portrait
Roberta Beary (born Roberta Marie Beary, 1954, Jamaica Estates, Queens, New York); retired finance attorney and active haiku and haibun poet and editor. In the early 1990s, she lived for five years in Tokyo, during which she began her study of haiku. She has submitted work to international journals, anthologies, and haiku contests since 1996. A longtime member of the Haiku Society of America and Towpath—Haiku Poets of the Chesapeake Watershed, she has served on the editorial board of the Red Moon Anthology and as Haibun Editor for Modern Haiku since 2012. Beary coedited the HSA members’ anthologies in 2006 and 2008, edited the Towpath members’ anthology in 2015, and coedited the international women’s anthology Wishbone Moon in 2018. She is frequently invited to judge contests, including the HSA Gerald M. Brady Senryu Awards (2003), the Robert Spiess Memorial Haiku Awards (2014), the Peggy Willis Lyles Haiku Awards (2015), and the Martin Lucas Haiku Award (2020). Beary’s 2007 book of poems, The Unworn Necklace, took first prize in the Snapshot Press Haiku Collection Competition and won a unique honor for a haiku book, a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Book Award. Most recently Beary coauthored Haibun: A Writer’s Guide (forthcoming in 2023), while her haibun “After Long Absence,” won the inaugural Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun (2022). She resides in Washington, D.C., and County Mayo, Ireland.
Note: This is an abstract of a longer biographical article to come.