Thomas Heffernan has been making haiku since the mid-1980s in Okinawa where he co-founded the bilingual haiku magazine Plover/Chidori. His English-language haiku have received a number of Mainichi awards and also Itoen and JAL (Japan Air Lines) prizes; he was awarded the 2006 Kusamakura Grand Prize for haiku. He has published ten books and chapbooks. His The Liam Poems about an ancestral kinsman, the Irish-language Jacobite poet William Heffernan the Blind (as W.B. Yeats called Liam Dall O’hIfearnain), received the 1982 Roanoke-Chowan Prize. He has been a lecturer at UNC Pembroke, Visiting Professor of English at St Andrews University, North Carolina and Professor of American Studies at Kagoshima Tanki Daigaku, Japan.
