Few people have done more to promote haiku poetry in the United States than Japanese translator and poet Hiroaki Sato.

On Haiku, by Hiroaki Sato.320 pagesNEW DIRECTIONS PUBLISHING, Nonfiction.

Over the course of his prolific career, the septuagenarian has translated an impressive range of Japanese classical and modern poets into English, including Princess Shikishi, Mutsuo Takahashi, Kenji Miyazawa, Kotaro Takamura, Matsuo Basho and Yukio Mishima (among many others). From 1979-81 he was elected president of the Haiku Society of America and, in 1982, Sato and American scholar Burton Watson were awarded the PEN Translation Prize for their volume "From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry."