Mosaic of Voice

Join us for an afternoon where nature, nuance, and finely crafted verse come alive through the art of haiku and contemporary poetry.

We are honored to feature two extraordinary poets whose work continues to shape and inspire the literary landscape:

Yvette Nicole Kolodji is a poet and artist from Whittier. She is the Southern California Haiku Study Group moderator and the membership secretary for the Haiku Poets of Northern California. She was a judge for the 2025 Poetry Out Loud Competition for Placer County and the 2024 Haiku Poets of Northern California Rengay Contest. She was the guest editor for The Haiku Foundation’s Haiku of the Day blog for June 2023. Her poetry has been published in many haiku journals and has been recognized as a winner of the 2025 Riverside Insect Fair Poem Contest and 2023 Santa Clarita Sidewalk Poetry Contest; runner-up for the 2025, 2022 and 2021 Golden Triangle Contests; received honorable mentions in the 2022 Haiku Society of America Rengay Award and the 2021 Haiku Poets of Northern California Rengay Contest; and short listed in 2014 for The Haiku Foundation's Touchstone Award. She enjoys leading haiku workshops and doing mixed-media art. She also loved advocating for the arts as an Activate Delegate for Arts for LA.

Susan Antolin fell in love with modern Japanese poetry while living in Japan in the late 1980s. She is the author of two haiku collections: Artichoke Season in 2009, and The Years That Went Missing, which was awarded first place in the Backbone Press haiku chapbook contest in 2020 and went on to receive the Touchstone Distinguished Book Award from the Haiku Foundation and first place in the Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards.
She is the editor of Acorn: a Journal of Contemporary Haiku, which has been in print for over twenty-five years. She is an active member and past president of the Haiku Poets of Northern California. In 2024, she co-edited The San Francisco Haiku Anthology: Volume Two, which contains the work of 94 Bay Area poets. She has a law degree from the University of San Francisco. In July of 2025, she will graduate from the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at NYU. She lives in Walnut Creek, CA, and can also be found at susantolinpoet.com and on Bluesky @susanantolin

* Open mic to follow – bring your own haiku or short poem to share!
* Let’s celebrate the power of small poems and big truths together.

Location: Lodi Public Library
201 W. Locust St.
Lodi, CA. 95240
Date: Saturday, May 10, 2025
Time: 2:00 PM