The Deep End of the Sky

CHAD LEE ROBINSON was born in 1980 in Pierre, South Dakota and grew up along the banks of the Missouri River. He continues to live there with his wife Kimberly and son Nathan, and works as the manager of his father’s grocery store.

It was in 2002, Robinson’s final year at South Dakota State University, that David Allan Evans, poet laureate of South Dakota, 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. 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.

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 is also a panelist for The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Distinguished Book Awards. Robinson also edited Gone Fishing, a Per Diem: Daily Haiku feature that appeared on The Haiku Foundation’s website in September 2014.