Margaret Chula

Margaret Chula grew up on her grandparent’s tobacco farm on the banks of the Connecticut River where she explored 80 acres of woods and meadows. In her thirties, she traveled around the world with her husband, then settled in Japan for 12 years where she taught English and creative writing at Kyoto Seika College and Doshisha Women’s College. She also studied the traditional arts of woodblock printing and flower arrangement.

Chula has published 14 collections of poetry: Grinding My Ink; This Moment; Shadow Lines (linked haibun with Rich Youmans); Always Filling, Always Full; The Smell of Rust; What Remains: Japanese American in Internment Camps (a collaboration with quilt artist Cathy Erickson); Just This; Daffodils at Twilight; Winter Deepens, One Leaf Detaches; Shadow Man; One Last Scherzo; Perigee Moon; and Firefly Lanterns: Twelve Years in Kyoto. Paulann Petersen, Poet Laureate Emerita of Oregon, writes: “Her poems seek out and find the miraculous in the seemingly ordinary. Employing rich and resonant imagery, her work delves into and opens a lifetime of defining experiences.”

Chula's poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Kyoto Journal, West Marin Review, Poet Lore, America’s Review, and Briarcliff Review. Writing fellowships include residencies at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and Playa at Summer Lake. Grants from Oregon Literary Arts and the Regional Arts and Culture Council have supported collaborations with poets, artists, musicians, photographers, and dancers. 

Chula has been a featured speaker and workshop leader at writers’ conferences throughout the United States, as well as in Poland, Canada, Peru, and Japan. In 2010, she was appointed Poet Laureate for Friends of Chamber Music in Portland, Oregon. She also served for five years as President of the Tanka Society of America and currently sits on the Advisory Committee for the Center for Japanese Studies at Portland State University. Chula is the founding editor of Katsura Press (1993-2015), dedicated to publishing Japanese poetic forms. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon.