Patricia Donegan served on the faculty of East-West poetics at Naropa University under Allen Ginsberg and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was a student of haiku master Seishi Yamaguchi, and a Fulbright scholar to Japan. She is a meditation teacher, previous poetry editor for Kyoto Journal, and a longtime member of the Haiku Society of America. Her haiku works include Love Haiku: Japanese Poems of Yearning, Passion & Remembrance (cotranslated with Yoshie Ishibashi), Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness and Open Your Heart, Haiku: Asian Arts for Creative Kids, and Chiyo-ni Woman Haiku Master (cotranslated with Yoshie Ishibashi). Her poetry collections include: Hot Haiku, Bone Poems, Without Warning, Heralding the Milk Light, and haiku selections in various anthologies.

She won first prize in the 1998 Mainichi International Haiku Contest and won a Merit Book Award for translation from the Haiku Society of America for her book on Chiyo-ni, also in 1998. Her books on haiku have combined scholarship and insight in reaching young and old to inspire and sustain a lifelong interesting in haiku poetry, in both Japanese and English.