Jim Haba
Poetry Director

“In a more humane world, we would slow down for poetry. We would slow down for poetry because poetry slows us down -- to feed us, to relieve our loneliness, to return us, at least momentarily, to our actual but neglected selves.”

“Poetry feeds the young. Poetry says ‘yes’ to the senses, ‘yes’ to dreaming, ‘yes’ to meaningful work. Who would not slow down for this?”

Jim Haba grew up on farms and islands in rural Washington. In 1962 he earned a B.A. from Reed College and in 1967 a Ph.D. from Cornell University. He taught in the English department at Rutgers, New Brunswick, from 1966 to 1972. From 1967 to 1970 he also began to study visual art, at Douglass College and at The Studio School for Drawing and Sculpture in New York City. In 1972 he joined the English department of Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, where he taught a wide range of courses and organized dozens of readings and workshops by distinguished poets. He retired from Rowan University in 2003.

In 1986 he accepted responsibility for designing and producing the first Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. He has now designed and produced all eleven biennial Festivals, North America’s largest poetry events. In 1987 he inaugurated the Dodge Poetry-in-the-Schools Program, which sends poets into New Jersey high schools and provides a variety of poetry-related experiences for New Jersey teachers at every classroom level. In 1992 he designed and organized what has become an annual, statewide series of poetry discussion and writing groups for teachers called Clearing the Spring, Tending the Fountain. He became the Dodge Foundation’s Poetry Director in 1999.

In 1995 he edited the best-selling book The Language of Life, which included poems by and interviews with poets featured at the 1988 and 1994 Dodge Poetry Festivals and at a special event that he produced for Bill Moyers at Glassboro State College in 1989. He served as Poetry Consultant for the 1995 Bill Moyers (8-hour) television series The Language of Life and three other Bill Moyers series also derived from Dodge Poetry Festivals: the 1989 series The Power of the Word (6 hours) and both 1999 series — Fooling With Words (2 hours) and Sounds of Poetry (4 ½ hours). In addition, he served as Poetry Consultant for the 1998 series Poetry Heaven (3 hours) and three, separate one-hour PBS programs that grew out of other Dodge Poetry Festivals, including Bill Moyers’ 1994 Emmy-winning portrait of Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon: A Life Together.

He began writing poems while teaching at Glassboro State College, became a frequent reader in the northeast, and has recently published two chapbooks: Thirty-One Poems and Love Poems.  His poems have won both fellowships and prizes. As a visual artist he continues to construct painted-paper collages and with his wife, Erica Barton Haba, he also designs and produces ceramic tile murals. Work from their studio in Hillsborough, New Jersey, has been installed from Texas and Maine to California.