2021 Porad Award

Haiku Northwest is pleased to announce its eighteenth annual Porad Haiku Award. The contest is named for Francine Porad, founder of Haiku Northwest, former president of the Haiku Society of America, and editor for eight years of Brussels Sprout, an international journal of haiku and art. We welcome your haiku submissions!

Deadline: Submissions through the online form, by email, or by postal mail open on June 1, 2021, and must be received by September 20, 2021.

Eligibility: Open to all, members and nonmembers alike, except Haiku Northwest officers, the contest coordinator, and judge.

Prizes: $100 for first prize, $50 for second prize, and $25 for third prize, plus honorable mentions. Winning entries will be published on the Haiku Northwest website (see past Porad Award Winners). Winners will be announced at Haiku Northwest’s annual Seabeck Haiku Getaway, scheduled for October 28–31, 2021.

Adjudication: Our 2021 judge is Susan Antolin. She fell in love with modern Japanese poetry while living in Japan in the late 1980s. She has served as the newsletter editor for the Haiku Society of America, as newsletter editor and past president of the Haiku Poets of Northern California, and as a frequent judge of haiku contests. The job she loves most is being editor of Acorn: A Journal of Contemporary Haiku. Her first collection of haiku and tanka, Artichoke Season, was published in 2009, and her recent collection, The Years that Went Missing, won the 2020 Backbone Press haiku chapbook contest, and also won a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award from the Haiku Foundation.

Entry Fees: The contest is FREE to enter this year. You may enter up to five haiku. To help offset costs, we welcome donations from those who are able to give.

Submissions: Haiku submitted must be previously unpublished. Haiku posted on public Facebook pages, blogs, or other websites are not eligible for submission. By submitting, you assert that your entries are previously unpublished and are solely your own original creations.

• Online Form Submissions (preferred): Please use our online submission form and enter your name, mailing address, email address, phone number, and up to five haiku. After you submit, you will receive an email confirmation showing your submitted poems (please keep a record of what you submit). Please do not submit before June 1, 2021. Entries must be received by midnight (Pacific Time) on September 20, 2021. Although the contest is free to enter, please consider donating, using the PayPal donate button above—thank you.

• Email Submissions: We strongly prefer that you submit using our online submission form, but if it does not work for you, you may submit by email. When submitting by email, please type or paste up to five previously unpublished haiku in the body of the message (no attached files) and write “Porad Award Entries—[your name]” in the subject line. Include your name, address, email address, and phone number. If you are concerned about any special formatting characteristics, you may add a brief note after each applicable poem. Please do not number your poems, and leave just one blank line between the poems. Please do not submit before June 1, 2021. Send by midnight (Pacific Time) on September 20, 2021 to the contest coordinator, Ron Swanson, at taibokuan@gmail.com.

• Postal Submissions: If you are unable to submit your work through the online submission form or by email, you may submit up to five previously unpublished poems on 8.5x11-inch or A4 paper (multiple poems on one sheet is preferred; do not use other sizes of paper or index cards). Please submit one copy of each sheet with your name, address, email address, and phone number. There is no need to send another copy without author identification for anonymous judging because all poems submitted by postal mail will be incorporated into an electronic file and then “shuffled” for anonymous judging. Please do not submit before June 1, 2021. Entries by postal mail must be received by September 20, 2021. Haiku Northwest is not responsible for delays caused by the U.S. postal service. Send your entry to:

Porad Haiku Award

c/o Ron Swanson

PO Box 4661

Rollingbay, WA 98061 USA

Rights: All rights revert to authors after publication on this website.

Additional Information: See past Porad Award results. If you have questions, please email WelchM@aol.com.