On 15 February, a presentation on "Haiku Poetry in American Sign Language: Metaphor in Time and Space " took place at the Mineral Point Opera House in Mineral Point, Wisconsin (see flyer below). The event was co-sponsored by PEN-International and included more than 50 in the audience. In addition to their original haiku they shared poems by and information about Prof. Robert Panara, who inspired the Haiku contests at NTID and Tsukuba College of Technology in Japan. They performed haiku and shared the stories of two deaf haiku poets, Kijo and Sanpu, and descriptions of past haiku trips to Japan sponsored by PEN-International, Jerome Cushman, a retired NTID faculty member, and Jack Williams, a deaf alum of RIT, utilized haiku to inform the hearing participants about deaf culture (see poster below).

Among the roughly 20 deaf people in the audience were Danny and Marika Houlihan, RIT Alums, with their four children from Milwaukee. Also there was Charles Trumbull, the editor of Modern Haiku, the oldest continuously published haiku magazine (1969), from Evanston, Illinois. The editor of Modern Haiku requested poems and an article for their journal.