On a mild early-autumn morning, I met with Crystal Simone Smith at the historic Burwell School in Hillsborough. As we sat on the porch of the 200-year-old house, I kept noticing things. The lacy shapes of the oak shadows. The pair of muddy shoe prints climbing the white steps. I wondered which details she might put in a haiku.
Smith, an instructor of Duke University’s writing and rhetoric program, is the current president of the Haiku Society of America. Ghost Woman: A Rising, out November 17 from Duke University Press, is her latest book. It’s a spellbinding sequence of haiku and haibun, a form that pairs haiku with short passages of prose. Smith will read from it at Arcana Bar and Lounge on December 15 and at So & So Books on December 17.
Ghost Woman moves with the cycles of the natural world, its five sections patterned on the classical elements of Japanese Buddhism: Wind, Earth, Water, Fire, Void. But the seasons it chronicles are the author’s own. Taken together, these bright flashes of presence grow complex with implicit narrative. They outline a landscape layered with relationships to race and class, history and memory, motherhood and campus life.
Ghost Woman also continues a rather astonishing publishing breakthrough. It’s Smith’s fifth book as author or editor/contributor in the last four years, after 15 years spent toiling in journals and chapbooks. We met at this historic site—recently renamed the Elizabeth Keckly Center at the Burwell School—because this is where Smith’s emergence unexpectedly began.
In 2009, Smith enrolled in an MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte. “I knew a writer who studied slavery,” she said. “I was just like, ‘Why?’ It’s one thing to know the history, but why would that be your focus? It’s such a dark time.”
But when she began teaching first-year college writing around 2014, in majority-white environments in the Triad, Smith felt drawn beyond the European canon. She began to study and teach slave narratives, which is how she learned about the Burwell School, where she met a board member who urged her to write about Elizabeth Keckly’s life.
A talented dressmaker, Keckly was born in 1818 and enslaved by the Burwell family at this site when it was one of the state’s earliest schools for young women. She is primarily remembered for later becoming a confidant of Mary Todd Lincoln. Smith highlights her savvy and drive.
“She began making dresses for elite white women, wives of politicians,” Smith said. “She was able to not only buy her own way out of slavery, but her son’s, and she ended up working in the White House. At a time when Black people were enslaved and had no voice, she was able to navigate all that.”
The board member introduced Smith to a literary agent, and they got to work. The first try, a children’s book, didn’t sell, so they shifted to the young-adult market, focusing on the teenage years when Keckly was enslaved in Hillsborough.
“She was beaten and violated many times,” Smith said. “She became pregnant by a white man who was close to her master. It was an unwanted pregnancy, but she didn’t have a choice. I’m thinking, ‘This is the story you want me to tell for a 16-year-old?’”
In the course of her research, Smith read George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, which briefly features Keckly. After the outbreak of COVID-19 and the killing of George Floyd, she started blacking out passages of the acclaimed Civil War novel. Isolated, with no courses to teach during a long research fellowship, she felt saved by writing.
The YA novel never manifested, but the erasure poem became Dark Testament, Smith’s first full-length book, published by the prestigious house Henry Holt & Company in 2023 with Saunders’ blessing on the cover. By then, Smith had learned that the Burwell School eventually evolved into Queens University, where she had asked, “Why write about slavery?”
“It was a full-circle moment for me,” she said. “Every bit of it connects.”
With ample writing time and an agent, Smith swiftly racked up publications. In 2025, she released Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound (Duke University Press), a haiku sequence based on newspaper ads placed by slaveholders in the 18th and 19th centuries.
2026 has already brought Griots: Keepers of the Story, an anthology of African American haiku that Smith co-edited, and Common Sense (1776), Addressed to Today’s Citizens of America, an erasure of Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet. The latter was released by Beacon Press, the storied progressive publisher of James Baldwin and Viktor Frankl.
“You start to look at these foundational documents, and you’re like, ‘Hmm, you know, we were never there to begin with,’” Smith said.
Erasure or blackout poetry is a method of redacting a found text to divulge a poem. As different as it may seem from haiku, both forms draw on similar skills: focus, acuteness, economy.
“Erasure poetry also depends on having a really critical eye,” Sheila Smith McKoy said by phone. “You’re finding a meaning with the same kind of surgical hand you have to use in haiku.”
Smith McKoy is a scholar and poet, most recently published in the Griots anthology and her own haiku collection Above the Rushes. She’s also the editor of the two-volume Elizabeth Keckley Reader. The different spelling of Keckly’s name, once the accepted standard, comes from her heavily edited 1868 memoir. In the Burwell School’s rebranding—an effort in which Smith McKoy was one of the researchers involved—they embraced how she signed her letters: “Keckly.”
Smith McKoy met Smith through the Carolina African American Writers Collective, a 30-year institution founded in Raleigh. It includes all kinds of poetry, but the influence of its founder, haiku master Lenard D. Moore, reverberates widely. Moore and Smith edited Griots together. “He has mentored a whole new generation of African American haiku poets,” Smith said.
Most adults who went to American public schools remember being taught haiku as a paint-by-numbers game with words—three lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively, having something to do with nature.
“I still remember a haiku that I published in a literary magazine in high school—about a butterfly, you know,” Smith McKoy said, laughing. “What’s been wonderful, though, is moving beyond that 5-7-5 form and really coming to understand how haiku has been shaped in America.”
Ghost Woman is Smith’s most personal and patient book—the result of 12 years spent writing haiku, starting with Moore’s tutelage.
“His challenge to me was to write one haiku a day for a year,” she said. “At the end of the week, maybe one is doing something. When I’m challenged, I’m like a dog with a bone.”
The autobiographical shadows passing through the haiku are illuminated in the incisive prose of the haibun, where Smith might reflect on escaping from urban confines to the Blue Ridge Mountains, or measure the effects of age, or circle around family secrets. Rather than counting syllables, the point is the brevity of the line, the tension and contrast. Readers who expect simplistic images of cherry blossoms will be caught off guard.
“With haiku, you have an aha moment. It’s Zen-influenced, so you are just really attentive. Moments are fleeting, and you’re amplifying that.”
crystal simone smith, poet
“With haiku, you have an aha moment,” Smith said. “It’s Zen-influenced, so you are just really attentive. Moments are fleeting, and you’re amplifying that. I was a free-verse poet first, so I’m used to starting, pivoting, the turn line, and then that full-circle moment when you close the poem.”
A haiku may capture a fleeting present, but our experience of the present is often suffused with the past. “Sitting here with these however-old oak trees, there are moments, like this leaf that just fell there, that you’re going to capture,” Smith said. “But that would conjure something, perhaps in my childhood, you know—those Blue Ridge Mountains I was talking about.”
Haiku is popular around the world; Smith and Smith McKoy underscore its universality and adaptability. All humans experience seasons, just not in the same way. Last year, Smith McKoy edited a section on African haiku writers for a research journal, Juxtapositions. Working with the Africa Haiku Network, these writers had developed their own kigo, or season words, for their regions.
“Their movement has been particularly significant given that there continues to be sort of a lean into Western ideas around weather, when indeed weather is a different phenomenon across the world,” Smith McKoy said. “That’s something that makes haiku particularly culturally resonant to the space in which it was written.”
So the form called African American haiku is not an imitation of 17th-century Japanese origins, but an extension. It has its own terrain, its own concerns. Smith McKoy mentions its resonance with mortality and healing: Richard Wright writing thousands of haiku while he was dying in exile. And Smith is particularly attuned to racial disparities regarding access to nature.
“When I look out into nature as an African American person, it has a different meaning for me than it has for a white person,” she said, gazing down the long green lawn that slopes to Churton Street. “We think about the bird-watcher in New York, or the historical nature of trees and lynchings. Black people did not go to oceans years ago. I tease my students when we’re talking about haiku and nature, natural beauty is usually privately owned.”
Later, when the mosquitoes chased us inside the museum, we sat on an antique couch next to a replica of a purple velvet gown that Keckly made for Lincoln. The original, one of the few Keckly creations known to still exist, is at the National Museum of American History. Standing empty, it’s poignant as an erasure poem—evocative as a haiku—a symbol of the Keckly legacy that quickened Smith’s writing and teaching into a legacy of her own.
“Keckly was able to do many fantastic things, of which one was training other Black women to be seamstresses and business owners,” Smith McKoy said. “She passed that craft along. Crystal is a gifted writer. She takes into account the history that brought her pen to paper. She doesn’t forget her origin. And as a teacher, she lives this with her students.”
Last year, Smith went to Tokyo to walk 25 miles of the Narrow Road to the North, the famous pilgrimage where Basho is credited with inventing haibun.
“He wants to see all of the beautiful aspects of Japan and write haiku,” Smith said. “But the trip is so grueling that he ends up writing prose between the haiku. … You were in deep, dark terrain. You could walk into a forest and it was almost night because the tree canopy was so dense. But when you get to those beautiful spaces, you’re like, ah.”
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