Mikhail Baru

He graduated from the D. I. Mendeleev Moscow Institute of Chemical Technology. He holds a Candidate of Technical Sciences degree. He worked as a senior researcher at the Branch of the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry in Pushchino-on-the-Oka. From August 2001 to February 2002, he worked in San Diego, California, USA, as a research associate and consultant.

Baru is one of the best known and most prolific authors of Russian haiku, though he tends toward ironic and humorous tercets closer to the traditional Japanese genre of senryū. Baru’s tercets have been published in the specialized haiku almanacs Triton and Haikumena, and in the magazines Arion, Volga, Fontan, and others. Baru also compiled an anthology of contemporary Russian haiku, part of which was published in 2004 in St. Petersburg in five issues (St. Petersburg State University of Technology and Design). In 2006, the publishing house Krasnyy Matros (St. Petersburg) issued the complete version of the anthology of Russian haiku, senryū, and tercets (about one thousand poems by more than one hundred authors). As a translator, Baru has published extensive selections of contemporary English-language haiku on the Internet, presenting Russian versions of several significant American anthologies.