Roberta Beary (they/them) is a poet, a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction, and a spoken-word artist who divides their time between the USA and Ireland. Identifying as gender fluid, they write to connect with other trauma survivors. Their first full-length haibun collection, Crazy Bitches (MacQ, 2025), includes haibun from 2004 to 2024. They are a frequent judge of haibun and haiku contests.
Beary’s prose poem “After You Self Medicate with Roethke’s The Waking Read by Text to Speech App” was a joint winner of the Bridport Prize for poetry in 2022. Other awards include the inaugural Touchstone Award for Haibun and Rattle Poetry Contest finalist. Their work appears in The New York Times, Rattle, MacQueen’s Quinterly, among other periodicals, and in myriad haiku journals, as well as in the anthology Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W. W. Norton, 2016).
With Lew Watts and Rich Youmans, Beary is co-author of Haibun: A Writer’s Guide (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023). Beary’s debut collection of short poems, The Unworn Necklace, won the Snapshot Press Book Award in 2005; was first published in Great Britain by Snapshot Press in 2007 (with a hardcover edition in 2011); and was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Book Award, the first book of haiku to receive such recognition. Beary’s prose poem collection, Deflection (Accents Publishing, 2015), was named a National Poetry Month Best Pick by Washington Independent Review of Books. Their most recent haiku collection, Carousel (2024), won the Snapshot Press Book Award. Beary’s collaborative work with Clan Beo on One Breath: The Reluctant Engagement Project, which pairs the poet’s writings with artwork by people with disabilities and their families, was named a Finalist for the da Vinci Eye Book Award in 2023 (an Eric Hoffer Award for superior cover artwork), and was shortlisted for the Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. The long-time haibun editor at Modern Haiku, Beary co-edited with Ellen Compton and Kala Ramesh an international anthology of haiku by women: Wishbone Moon (Jacar Press, 2018).
For a comprehensive list of publications and awards, see Beary’s profile at Poets & Writers.