I was born in Wales and as a child moved about, with my parents and my younger sister, between Pakistan, Malaysia, and Jamaica. My schooling was in Wales and England; my degrees from Bristol University and Teachers College, Columbia University. After five years as a school teacher in Nigeria, I came to the United States, where I have worked as a school teacher, tutor and sponsor of refugees, editor, and community volunteer. My two daughters were born here. I have lived in various places up and down the East Coast, but it seems that I am now more or less settled in the central Piedmont of North Carolina.
“Settling,” in my understanding of the word, still includes travels—sometimes far and long, to the United Kingdom and Ireland, Italy, and Iceland, for example, but also exploring and camping with my daughters and their children in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, and with The Nature Conservancy fire crews and naturalists around North Carolina. It is here in North Carolina, too, that I settled into Zen practice.
I am a member of the Black Socks Poets and the Carrboro Poetry Council and a frequent participant in readings, exhibits, and workshops in North Carolina. My poems have appeared in various anthologies and print and online poetry magazines, most recently Tar River Poetry, New England Review, The Southern Review, Red Fez, The Phare, Rhino, Canary, and The Adirondack Review. Other poems are collected in Stone, Water, Time (catalog accompanying the exhibit of art by Lyric Kinard, Cary 2019). My chapbook, The Garden of Persuasions, won the 2013 Jacar Press Chapbook Award.
Maura High 