The Touchstone Awards for Individual Haibun are bestowed annually on haibun that represent noteworthy additions to English-language haibun in the estimation of a distinguished panel. The Awards are open to any English-language haibun first published in the current calendar year. For current and past award-recipients, please see the Touchstone Archive.
What Is The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun?
In 2022, as part of its mission to expand possibilities for English-language haiku, The Haiku Foundation added The Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun to the two other awards in its Touchstone Award Series: the Touchstone Award for Individual Poems and the Touchstone Distinguished Books Award. Collections of or including haibun have always been eligible for a Distinguished Book Award; this new Award allows for the recognition of individual pieces. For current and past award-recipients, please see the Touchstone Archive.
All awards seek to reward excellence and innovation each calendar year. Results are determined through a year-long nomination and selection process and are released the following year on April 17, International Haiku Poetry Day. Award recipients are selected by independent panels comprised of authorities in the field.
How Are Panel Members Chosen?
The panel consists of three members who are chosen by the Touchstone Awards Committee. The Committee chooses panel members who have demonstrated expertise in the haibun genre.
What Haibun Are Eligible for Nomination?
The Coordinator for the Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun solicits nominations during the award year from editors whose journals publish haibun. In addition, any individual may nominate two haibun, one of which may be their own. For the purposes of this award, publication is constituted by, but not limited to, first appearance in a juried or edited public venue such as a book, journal, online site, or contest. The Awards Committee reserves the right to determine whether a poem meets this criterion.
Nominations for the current year will open shortly after the previous year’s awards have been announced. Haibun written by the Individual Haibun Award coordinator and panelists are not eligible for nomination.
How Are the Winning Haibun Selected?
In the first round, the panel’s three members consider the entire anonymous roster of poems and nominate their highest-ranking haibun. These comprise the Long List. The panel then discusses the merits of the long-listed poems and votes for the poems to make up the Short List. In the final round, the panel votes to determine which of these will be recognized with Touchstone Awards. Once they have determined the awarded haibun, panel members write commentaries for each of them.
The entire process is anonymous: authors and citations for winning poems are revealed to the panelists only after they have written their commentaries for the winning poems.
How to Submit Nominations
The opening of nominations for the latest Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun is announced on our blog. The deadline to submit is December 31.
You may nominate no more than two poems per year, only one of which may be (but does not have to be) your own work. Nominated poems must be submitted with our entry form.
Entry Form: Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun
- Learn more about the Touchstone Distinguished Books Award
- Learn more about the Touchstone Awards for Individual Poem
Ethics Statement:
Each year, the Touchstone Awards (Books, Haibun, and Poems) have dedicated Coordinators. The nominations for each Award and their data (voting and panel discussion) are siloed from the other Awards and are only seen by that Award’s Coordinator.
Hence, Coordinators are eligible for Awards in the different categories in which they are not involved since they are not privy to that information. Likewise, the Committee Chair cannot access data unrelated to his Award section until the results are published.
The Panel for Award Year 2025
Billie Dee is the former Poet Laureate of the U.S. National Library Service. A retired health care professional, she earned her doctoral degree from U.C. Irvine, with post-graduate training at U.C. San Diego. Although she writes in a variety of genres, her primary focus is Japaniform poetry. She’s won numerous writing awards, enjoys editing and workshopping with other poets in the international scene. A native Californian, Billie now lives in the Chihuahuan Desert with her family and a betta fish named Ramon. She publishes online and off. Visit her website.
Richard L. Matta is an award-winning Japanese short-form and long-form poet. Hundreds of his poems have been published in highly reputable worldwide journals. A Pushcart nomination recipient in 2023, his haiku and haibun have been nominated for Touchstone Awards. He served as Editor for the inaugural issue of Laurels, a tanka journal, and he co-judged the Haiku Society of America rengay contest with Billie Dee. Some of his long-form work is published in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Red Rock Review, Stirring, ONE ART, and his haiku can be found in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Heron’s Nest, and many other short-form journals. Originally from a small town near New York City, Richard now resides in San Diego, California.
Lorraine A Padden received a Touchstone Award for Individual Poems in 2022, and her debut collection Upwelling was a finalist for the Distinguished Book Award that same year. Her haibun appear internationally in notable print and online journals, and her work has been cited in research on innovative techniques in haibun composition and construction. Lorraine has served as guest editor for Contemporary Haibun Online, and was also featured haibun editor for the annual Anthology of the Southern California Haiku Study Group. Lorraine’s poetry has received multiple awards from the Haiku Society of America, Tricycle Magazine, Haiku Poets of Northern California, British Haiku Society, and the Tokutomi International Haiku Competition, among others. She is a featured poet in A New Resonance 13; the annual Red Moon Press and Contemporary Haibun anthologies have also showcased her work. Lorraine has judged several competitions and recently served as a panelist for the Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. In a previous life Lorraine was a classical ballerina and served as a Fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C.