Route 9 Haiku Group is a small, exclusive local haiku group based in the Capital District of Upstate New York. It was founded in 2000 by Hilary Tann, Yu Chang, and John Stevenson and later joined by Tom Clausen and Ion Codrescu. The group meets monthly, usually in the Tai Pan restaurant in Halfmoon, N.Y., which specializes in dim sum (Chinese dumplings), and which in turn suggested the name of the group's biannual haiku journal, Upstate Dim Sum.

Yu Chang (born August 30, 1938, Ichang, Hubei, China; moved to Taiwan with his family at the end of World War II), American college professor and poet writing haiku, renku, and tanka. After earning graduate degrees at the University of Wisconsin and Syracuse University, he taught at Union College in Schenectady, New York, where he is now professor emeritus of electrical engineering. His earliest haiku appeared on the Shiki Internet Haiku Salon, winning top honors in that internet kukai in 1996 and 1997; he served as Shiki Internet Salon secretary from 1997 to 1999. His work has won the Museum of Haiku Literature Award in Frogpond (1998, 2009) and the Haiku Society of America’s Harold G. Henderson Award (1999). Twenty-one of the twenty-five annual Red Moon anthologies (1996–present) have contained Yu Chang’s work. His book publication credits include Seeds (Red Moon Press, 2009) and Small Things Make Me Laugh (Free Food Press, 2016). He was a founding member of the Route 9 Haiku Group and has been editor of its journal Upstate Dim Sum since 2001. He resides in Schenectady, New York.