In 2022, I founded The Haiku Project, a multi-platform alternative pathway to wellbeing that invites its online community to reconnect with nature by practicing haiku. During summer, I started delivering free haiku workshops at the community-oriented Alexandra Park in Moss Side. From the beginning, I have enjoyed working with a diverse audience: poets, actors, musicians, psychotherapists, and people in recovery for addiction. I could never have imagined that this project would lead me to have my first experience as an editor of an anthology.
Through our Instagram profile, the project quickly attracted the attention of people around the world. For this reason, in September 2022, I started delivering online workshops and that is when I got contacted by The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press, an indie publisher specialising in poetry anthologies and digital zines with all profit donated to charity. In December 2022, I started collaborating with the publisher, hosting monthly workshops for their community of poets. Following our successful collaborations, I presented the publisher with the idea of publishing a haiku anthology with the aim to represent the voices of our global community.
This year, I officially joined The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press team as a co-editor and co-curator of the forthcoming haiku anthology To Live Here. The anthology invites writers to embrace the theme of ‘home’: our connection with nature and the urban environment, and how climate change is affecting us and our habitat. Bruce H. Feingold, haiku poet and member of the Board of Directors at The Haiku Foundation, will be writing the foreword to this anthology, which will be available to purchase from July 2023, and all proceedings will be donated to Salford Loaves and Fishes Ltd, a charity organisation supporting adults who are homeless or at risk of homelessness.
Follow Giorgia and her project on Instagram @thehaikuproject22.
