Kat Lehmann is a Haiku Foundation Touchstone Award-winning (Poem and Book awards) haiku poet based in New England, USA. Her work is included in the anthologies A New Resonance: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku, and multiple editions each of The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku, Haiku 200x, and Contemporary Haibun, among other anthologies.
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Kat went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts and earned a bachelor's degree in molecular biology. She worked at Harvard Medical School as a lab technologist before moving to Salt Lake City, Utah for graduate school, where she earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry for her work on a class of RNA editing enzymes called double-stranded RNA adenosine deaminases. After working long hours in the lab, she would read poetry into the early morning hours, particularly the Confessional poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, as well as Sharon Olds, Emily Dickinson, Lucille Clifton, Edna St Vincent Millay, and E. E. Cummings.
After graduate school, she moved to San Diego for a postdoctoral fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute, where she studied the assembly of ribonucleoprotein complexes involved in developmental pathways in yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and nematode (Caenorhabditis elegans). She then moved to Connecticut with her husband to work at an institutional review board at a major research university and later as a regulatory specialist for clinical trials and other human subjects research.
What first inspired Kat to transition from an avid reader of poetry to a writer of poetry was the self-discovery of endured hardship and loss. Her mother was afflicted with a major mental illness, a circumstance that Kat navigated largely alone as the full scope of the illness was still unfolding. The hybrid memoir A Beloved Fire Becomes the House (Red Moon Press, 2026) is inspired by this. She decided to share her creative work with the hope that her healing journey would engage readers on their own journeys through pain and wonder. In her first decade of writing, over 600 of her poems were published by literary journals, international contests, and anthologies.
Kat's work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions for haibun (Contemporary Haibun Online, 2025; Modern Haiku, 2023), the Pushcart Prize for a multi-haiku form she created (sudo-ku; Rattle, 2023), the Pushcart Prize for poetry (Sonic Boom, 2021), and Best of the Net for haibun (Human/Kind Journal, 2019). She received the Museum of Haiku Literature Award from the Haiku Society of America's journal Frogpond, a Sakura Award from the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational, and won second place in the Haiku Society of America Henderson Haiku contest. She is a winner of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize for her first collection of haiku no matter how it ends a bluebird's song, which went on to win The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Books Award (2025) and place third (tie) in the Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award.
Kat is co-founder and co-chief editor of whiptail: journal of the single-line poem. She served as a panelist in The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Books Award (2021-2023), co-judged the 2022 Haiku Society of America Harold G. Henderson Haiku Award, and is a Trailblazer Contest co-founder and former panelist (2021-2023).
Kat enjoys exploring the storytelling possibilities of the prose-haiku hybrid form haibun as well as single- and multi-haiku forms. One such multi-ku form she created, called sudo-ku, weaves several thematically related haiku to express a unified poem. Sudo-ku have been published in poetry journals and recognized as a semi-finalist of the 2021 Rattle Poetry Prize as well as a Pushcart Prize nomination. A collection of Kat's sudo-ku ('to wade through the wind as a night') is a part of the Ghost City Press 2025 summer series. Kat's science background continues to inform her nature-centered explorations and fuels the soulful resonance of her poetic works.
Kat lives with her family on the edge of an old-growth fairy forest filled with streams and the inspiration of trees growing around boulders. She works behind the scenes on the regulatory aspects of clinical trials for kidney patients. She enjoys hiking, creating clay work on a potter's wheel, and being a faithful minion for her cats Vega, Newman, and Oppie Otterfox.
BlueSky, Instagram: @SongsOfKat
Other Online Bios
Poets & Writers
The Haiku Foundation's Haiku Registry
The Living Haiku Anthology
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Kat went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts and earned a bachelor's degree in molecular biology. She worked at Harvard Medical School as a lab technologist before moving to Salt Lake City, Utah for graduate school, where she earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry for her work on a class of RNA editing enzymes called double-stranded RNA adenosine deaminases. After working long hours in the lab, she would read poetry into the early morning hours, particularly the Confessional poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, as well as Sharon Olds, Emily Dickinson, Lucille Clifton, Edna St Vincent Millay, and E. E. Cummings.
After graduate school, she moved to San Diego for a postdoctoral fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute, where she studied the assembly of ribonucleoprotein complexes involved in developmental pathways in yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and nematode (Caenorhabditis elegans). She then moved to Connecticut with her husband to work at an institutional review board at a major research university and later as a regulatory specialist for clinical trials and other human subjects research.
What first inspired Kat to transition from an avid reader of poetry to a writer of poetry was the self-discovery of endured hardship and loss. Her mother was afflicted with a major mental illness, a circumstance that Kat navigated largely alone as the full scope of the illness was still unfolding. The hybrid memoir A Beloved Fire Becomes the House (Red Moon Press, 2026) is inspired by this. She decided to share her creative work with the hope that her healing journey would engage readers on their own journeys through pain and wonder. In her first decade of writing, over 600 of her poems were published by literary journals, international contests, and anthologies.
Kat's work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions for haibun (Contemporary Haibun Online, 2025; Modern Haiku, 2023), the Pushcart Prize for a multi-haiku form she created (sudo-ku; Rattle, 2023), the Pushcart Prize for poetry (Sonic Boom, 2021), and Best of the Net for haibun (Human/Kind Journal, 2019). She received the Museum of Haiku Literature Award from the Haiku Society of America's journal Frogpond, a Sakura Award from the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational, and won second place in the Haiku Society of America Henderson Haiku contest. She is a winner of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize for her first collection of haiku no matter how it ends a bluebird's song, which went on to win The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Books Award (2025) and place third (tie) in the Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award.
Kat is co-founder and co-chief editor of whiptail: journal of the single-line poem. She served as a panelist in The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Books Award (2021-2023), co-judged the 2022 Haiku Society of America Harold G. Henderson Haiku Award, and is a Trailblazer Contest co-founder and former panelist (2021-2023).
Kat enjoys exploring the storytelling possibilities of the prose-haiku hybrid form haibun as well as single- and multi-haiku forms. One such multi-ku form she created, called sudo-ku, weaves several thematically related haiku to express a unified poem. Sudo-ku have been published in poetry journals and recognized as a semi-finalist of the 2021 Rattle Poetry Prize as well as a Pushcart Prize nomination. A collection of Kat's sudo-ku ('to wade through the wind as a night') is a part of the Ghost City Press 2025 summer series. Kat's science background continues to inform her nature-centered explorations and fuels the soulful resonance of her poetic works.
Kat lives with her family on the edge of an old-growth fairy forest filled with streams and the inspiration of trees growing around boulders. She works behind the scenes on the regulatory aspects of clinical trials for kidney patients. She enjoys hiking, creating clay work on a potter's wheel, and being a faithful minion for her cats Vega, Newman, and Oppie Otterfox.
BlueSky, Instagram: @SongsOfKat
Other Online Bios
Poets & Writers
The Haiku Foundation's Haiku Registry
The Living Haiku Anthology
