Kristen Lindquist attended Middlebury College in Vermont and received her MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. She worked many summers at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her poetry and other writings have appeared in such venues as Down East, Maine Times, Bangor Metro, and Bangor Daily News, as well as various literary/haiku journals and anthologies. Most notably, she was included in the anthology A New Resonance 12: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku (Red Moon Press, 2021), and her haiku were featured on Cornell’s Mann Library’s Daily Haiku Page. Her publications include the chapbook Invocation to the Birds (Oyster River Press, 2001),  Transportation (Megunticook Press, 2011), which was a finalist for a Maine Literary Award, Tourists in the Known World: New & Selected Poems (Megunticook Press, 2017), the haiku e-chapbook It Always Comes Back (Snapshot Press, 2021), which was a winner of the 2020 Snapshot Press eChapbook Award, and the haiku collection Island (Red Moon Press, 2023). Her haibun collection What We Tell Each Other, winner of the 2023 Snapshot Press eChapbook Award, is forthcoming in 2024.

Her work has received various awards, including two Maine Press Association awards for outdoor writing. Garrison Keillor has read three of her poems on National Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac. Maine State Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum has read several of her poems on Maine Public Radio’s Poems from Here.

She wrote a natural history column for the local papers for over 15 years (most recently for Pen Bay Pilot; read a recent column here) and since 2009 has maintained a daily haiku blog, Book of Days. In addition to writing, she also teaches on occasion and has led haiku workshops around the state. She is the current coordinator of The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Awards for Individual Haibun, as well as the Haiku Society of America’s Regional Coordinator for the Northeast (New England). Here’s a January 2024 interview with her by Jacob Salzer, as part of his Haiku Poet Interview series.

An avid birder since childhood, Kristen served as the first female member of the Maine Bird Records Committee. She guides bird outings around Maine for various organizations, including the Acadia Birding Festival.

Here she reads one of her poems, “Rapture,” and talks about her gratitude for birds and Maine’s landscape and land conservation ethic for the Natural Resource Council of Maine’s 2020 Earth Week.

She has served on the Town of Camden's Budget and Opera House Committees, was chair of the Maine Community Foundation's Knox County Fund and a board member of Friends of Maine Coastal Islands NWR. If you’re on Monhegan Island this summer, you might see her working at the Monhegan Museum of Art & History. She currently serves on the board of Monhegan Associates, the island’s land trust.

She lives in her hometown of Camden, Maine with her husband, novelist Paul Doiron.