Poetry at the Rainbow Café presents the works of Tanya McDonald and Michael Dylan Welch on Monday, March 6.

The program is from 7 to 9 p.m. at the café, 112 E. Main St.

Coffee and conversation follow readings. It is an open mic opportunity. The public is invited.

About the poets

Tanya McDonald started writing haiku in the mid-1990s at Linfield College, where she could be found surreptitiously counting out the syllables on her fingers in literature classes.

A native Oregonian, she now resides in Woodinville with her husband, their cat and a ridiculous number of books. She has been a member of Haiku Northwest since 2008. When she’s not composing haiku on buses or on walks, she is working on her urban fantasy novel.

Her poems have appeared in Modern Haiku; Frogpond; Bottle Rockets; The Heron’s Nest; Acorn; Dwarf Stars 2010; Where the Wind Turns: The 2009 Red Moon Anthology; and Fifty-Seven Damn Good Haiku by a Bunch of Our Friends.

She has served as regional coordinator for the Washington State region of the Haiku Society of America.

Michael Dylan Welch is editor and publisher of Press Here haiku and tanka books.

From 2009 to 2013, he served as vice president for the Haiku Society of America (HSA) and also served as a board member of the Washington Poets Association from 2004 to 2013. He also curates two monthly poetry reading series (for longer poetry), SoulFood Poetry Night and the Redmond Association of Spokenword.

In 2008 and 2009 he was regional coordinator for the HSA’s Washington State region, Haiku Northwest, and in 2008 he co-founded Haiku Northwest’s annual Seabeck Haiku Getaway with Alice Frampton. Welch edited the haiku journal Woodnotes from 1989 to 1997, edited Tundra: The Journal of the Short Poem from 1998 to 2002, co-founded the Haiku North America conference in 1991 (directing the 2005 conference in Port Townsend and the 2011 conference in Seattle), co-founded the American Haiku Archives in 1996, and founded the Tanka Society of America in 2000, for which he served as president for five years.

In 2010, he also founded National Haiku Writing Month, or NaHaiWriMo, which also has an active Facebook page. His haiku and longer poems have been published in hundreds of journals and anthologies in at least fifteen languages.

In 2008, PIE Books published his contranslation (with Emiko Miyashita) of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, or 100 Poets: Passions of the Imperial Court, a collection of waka (tanka) poems compiled in 13th-century Japan by Fujiwara no Teika.

In 2012, a translation from this collection was featured on 150,000,000 postage stamps issued by the United States Postal Service.

He has also published Noh (2010), Bonsai (2011) and Furoshiki (2011), all art/photography books from PIE Books.

His most recent haiku books include For a Moment, published in 2009 by King’s Road Press in Canada; Fifty-Seven Damn Good Haiku by a Bunch of Our Friends, published in 2010 by Press Here (co-edited with Alan Summers); Tidepools: Haiku On Gabriola, published in 2011 by Pacific-Rim Publishers in British Columbia; and With Cherries on Top, published in 2012 by Press Here, among others.

Welch’s website, devoted mostly to haiku and related poetry, is called Graceguts.

The Rainbow Cafe, Striped Water Poets, the NorthWest Renaissance, Auburn Arts Commission, City of Auburn, and King County 4Culture make the program possible.