Chad Lee Robinson grew up along the banks of the Missouri River in central South Dakota. He continues to live there with his wife Kimberly and his son Nathan, and works as the manager of his father’s store, Korner Grocery.
It was in 2002, while attending South Dakota State University, that David Allan Evans, the poet laureate of South Dakota at that time, introduced him to haiku by sharing a translation of Basho’s haiku about a crow on a bare branch. The attraction was immediate, and Robinson has since devoted all of his creative energy to haiku, senryu and tanka. More than 650 of his poems have been published. Much of his work is about small towns and the Great Plains.
Robinson’s first chapbook of haiku, Pop Bottles, won the 2009 True Vine Press Summer Chapbook Competition, and was published by the press that same year. His second chapbook of haiku, Rope Marks, was one of eight winners in the Snapshot Press eChapbook Awards 2011, and was published by the press in 2012. A third contest-winning chapbook, The Deep End of the Sky, won the 2014 Turtle Light Press Haiku Chapbook Competition, and was published by the press in 2015. The Deep End of the Sky was also awarded second place in the Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards for 2016. His fourth chapbook of haiku, The White Buffalo, won the 2022 Backbone Press Haiku Chapbook Contest and was published by Backbone Press in 2023.
In addition to his prize-winning chapbooks, Robinson’s haiku and senryu have received a number of awards, including The Heron’s Nest Readers’ Choice Awards Poem (2008) and Poet of the Year (2008, 2020), a Modern Haiku Award for senryu (2006), three Touchstone Awards for Individual Haiku from The Haiku Foundation (2011, 2018 and 2022), as well as a Pushcart Prize nomination from Modern Haiku for his haiku sequence “Say Uncle” (2011). His work has been anthologized in many places such as A New Resonance: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku Volume 4 (Red Moon Press, 2005), Baseball Haiku (W.W. Norton, 2007), Montage: The Book (The Haiku Foundation, 2010), Haiku 21 (Modern Haiku Press, 2011), Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton, 2013), and nineteen editions of the Red Moon Anthology series from Red Moon Press.
Along with his achievements as a poet, Robinson has served the Haiku Society of America as Plains & Mountains regional coordinator (2006-2011 and again in 2014). He was also a panelist for The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Distinguished Book Awards (for award years 2013, 2014 and 2015). Robinson also edited Gone Fishing, a Per Diem: Daily Haiku feature that appeared on The Haiku Foundation’s website in September 2014.
For more information about Chad Lee Robinson’s work, please visit his author profiles at:
Poets & Writers Magazine http://www.pw.org/content/chad_lee_robinson
The Haiku Foundation http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/poet-details/?IDclient=321
contact Chad at: jedirobinson (at) yahoo (dot) com
The Deep End of the Sky 
Chad, Congratulations! Please send me a few of your favorite haiku from your new book, and I will run one on my blog.
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I will definitely send you some. Thank you, Charlotte!
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Hi, Chad,
I am the publisher and art director of the cherita: your storybook journal. ai li told me about you. ai li and I wrote a one-line erotic haiku we would like to submit to you for consideration. I would also like to submit a few other haiku I have written if you are interested.
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Hi Michael,
Thank you for stopping by The Deep End of the Sky. Actually, The Deep End of the Sky is just my blog where I keep those interested in my writing informed about where my work is published. I don’t publish anyone else’s work here because The Deep End of the Sky isn’t a journal or publication of that kind, and I’m not an editor. I do appreciate you stopping by and looking around, and I hope you’ll continue to do so should you be interested in keeping up with my writing activity. Thank you!
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