Rose Anna Higashi was born in Joplin Missouri and, during childhood, lived in various locations in Kansas and the Pacific Northwest with her parents, brother, and sister while her father, Patrick Murdock, completed his Ph.D. in History from Washington State University in Pullman, and her mother, Betty Murdock, earned her Ph.D. in Speech from the University of Missouri in Columbia.
After the family settled in California when Rose Anna was twelve, Patrick and Betty both had long careers in public education, Patrick as a history professor and Betty as a school speech pathologist. Rose Anna spent the majority of her adult life in Northern California where she completed her BA and MA degrees in English Literature, suma cum laude, from San Jose State University.
When she was eighteen, Rose Anna married Wayne Higashi, a friend from high school whom she met at the age of fifteen. They are the parents of one son, David Higashi. Wayne and Rose Anna have been married for more than sixty years and have traveled together extensively throughout the world. Rose Anna taught English at San Jose State University and San Jose City College and volunteered to be a founding faculty member when a new California Community College, Evergreen Valley College, was constructed in San Jose in 1975 to accommodate the growth of Silicon Valley and the arrival in San Jose of thousands of refugees from Vietnam.
At Evergreen Valley College, Rose Anna founded the Spring Poetry Festival and the literary magazine Leaf by Leaf. In addition to English Composition, she taught Poetry, Creative Writing, Survey of English Literature, Shakespeare, Women in Literature, Asian and Asian American Literature, and Japanese Literature.
She developed the Japanese Literature course herself and introduced it into the curriculum, the first Japanese Literature class to be offered at a California community college. Rose Anna studied Japanese Language and Japanese Literature in greater depth during a sabbatical year at Stanford University.
Rose Anna’s Publications include the poetry collections Rose Anna’s Gift and Blue Wings (Paulist Press). She is also the author of a novel, The Learning Wars.
For the past fourteen years, she has written a haiku every day. She was a finalist in the Filoli Haiku Contest and was recently nominated by the Editors of Poets Online for the Pushcart Prize. Her poetry appears in Poets Online, Verse-Virtual, Spillwords, The Ekphrastic Review, The Agape Review, America Media, The Avocet, Integrated Catholic Life, The Scarlet Dragonfly Review, and other publications.
Rose Anna and Wayne are retired and now live in Honolulu where they continue to travel, and Rose Anna continues to write and publish poetry. She is an active member of the Union of Poets Virtual Open Mic, an international group of poets who share their poems virtually each month.
Her website, co-authored with her niece Kathleen Pedulla, hosts her monthly blog, “Tea and Travels,” along with many of her haiku and lyric poems.
Website:
myteaplanner.com
Paperback: 172 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (December 17, 2025)