Nick Virgilio was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1928. He grew up with his two brothers, Anthony and Larry, in Camden city. When he got out of the Navy in 1948, which he had entered after finishing high school, Nick worked around the country as a radio announcer before returning to Camden in 1958.

He graduated from Temple University in 1952 and was awarded a BA degree. In 1962 he discovered haiku when he came across a collection of English-language haiku by Kenneth Yasuda, A Pepper Pod, at Rutgers University. He devoted his life from then on to haiku. He was always bombarding his friends, including his parish priest, Father Michael Doyle, with new haiku, often prefacing each one with the phrase “What do you think of this one?” His book of poems, Selected Haiku, which was published in a second edition in 1988, was one of the most important books ever published by an American haiku poet. He died on January 3, 1989, while preparing to tape a CBS network TV show called “Nightwatch,” on which he was to discuss his favorite topic, haiku (adapted from Cor van den Heuvel, “Nick Virgilio and American Haiku: Creating Haiku and an Audience,” 1990).