Haiku Society of America
Haibun Awards for 2026
Peg Cherrin-Myers & Colleen M. Farrelly
judges
First Place:
by Edward Cody Huddleston, Baxley, GA
Classical Conditioning
Did Pavlov think about his dogs every time he heard a bell?
ice cream truck jingle
my inner child
asks for five bucks~ ~ ~
Comments from the Judges
An excellent example of Basho’s fueki-ryuko principle of modernity meeting classical form, our first choice primes the reader to expect psychology, while the question quietly turns the experiment back on the experimenter. It’s clever because it reverses the direction of conditioning. After enough repetitions, why wouldn’t the bell become associated with the dogs in his mind? It’s about memory and associations. The things we study, love, fear, or lose begin to attach themselves to ordinary objects and sounds. Does a widow think of her love whenever she sees someone with glasses like the ones he used to wear? Do veterans flinch at fireworks? In other words, we are all being conditioned all the time; it is a shared, universal experience transcending time and place. Brilliant and timeless!
Second Place:
by Judson Evans, Holbrook, MA
'Simpson's Dining Car'—
24 hour service—with free parking
1413 Main St., Houston, TX, Nov. 6, 1997Dear Wound Dressers,
Hope you like the daguerreotype tonality of this relic 50’s postcard. No such nostalgia for my lost decade. High risk/ low reward for the cast away. Hayloft, sawdust and syphilis at the Golden Spur. “Blackout Night” at The Mining Co.. Anonymous—my Latin name. Blindfolds, glory holes. Then, the first acronyms: GRID, gay plague, mystery cancer. Not a doctor or teacher like you, I could only count: Houston by 1987—already 300 dead. A.I.D.S rewriting the mock epic of my coming out before the muted fanfare of slogans: “Play Safe” , “Y’all Means All”, “Silence=Death”. Panic-driven comradeship of all believers. I was a gofer driving a pickup for ‘Foundation House’ –gathering dead young men’s furniture and furnishing other dying young men’s condos. And then fled east to Manhattan, the deeper plague grounds.
not to sit close
and dress the wounds —
carting cardboard boxes
False Friend Bob~ ~ ~
Comments from the Judges
An excellent title promising Americana and roadside nostalgia. The haibun immediately undercuts that expectation by turning the hermit crab postcard form into a portal to the AIDS crisis. It’s the contrast between the cheerful commercial slogan and the subject matter that creates a quiet irony lasting throughout the piece. “Anonymous—my Latin name” is witty, bitter, and devastating. “Then, the first acronyms: GRID, gay plague, mystery cancer.” Each label marks a stage in understanding, while carrying the prejudice and fear of its moment. This is an unforgettable piece. The repetition of young men’s creates a rhythm of persistent succession, while the furniture becomes a material record of lives cut short. “Plague grounds” has a medieval resonance that underscores how catastrophic the epidemic felt, while “fled” suggests there was nowhere truly safe to go; as HIV resurges in areas hit with funding cuts, this timely haibun addresses a potential future that other young people may face.
Third Place:
by Matthew Caretti, Mercersburg, PA
In a Walmart Parking Lot Just South of the Mason-Dixon
strangers don’t talk to stranger’s dogs in cars
God is a loaded word here. Like that other three-letter word. Gun. The young man fingering the rifle beside his beaming father.
eager or idle hands the devil in the details
Outside they add it to the rack in the pickup parked beside my own. Theirs lifted and with oversized tires. Mine in its shadow.
pointy end of things people say in passing
~ ~ ~
Comments from the Judges
This haibun immediately situates the poem geographically and symbolically. The reference to the Mason-Dixon Line carries historical and cultural associations. The parking lot becomes more than a parking lot—it becomes a crossroads of identity, politics, history, and everyday life. “God is a loaded word here. Like that other three-letter word. Gun.” The double meaning of “loaded” lands cleanly, referring to both emotional and political charge. The poet’s restraint is important. They do not assign motives or character but simply describe the scene—a prime example of showing rather than telling. The father’s expression does a tremendous amount of emotional work. The ending suggests a broader sense of cultural imbalance or feeling out of place. It is an open image and therefore more powerful. The haibun doesn’t rely on outrage or commentary; it trusts the concrete images without explanation—truly an example of Shiki’s shasei applied to the haibun form.
Honorable Mention:
by Jennifer Hambrick, Worthington, OH
Warp
You pushed your way into this sudden swath of time. That slender instant slid through a gap between stars and into my lungs, crackling each umbrella fold to life. Your light years wove through mine, and a lifetime later my exhaled particles found you. Breath can speak of breath but can't explain how it becomes years and at the same time steals them. Travel on the tilt of the Earth as you're shuttling around the Milky Way until you slay the dragons at the frayed edge of the map. It's true that whole worlds spin in the eye of a needle, but grasp life and it turns into a cloud in your hand. Something moves inside this angled strand of vapor. It rustles like wind whispering a wish.
indigo moment
just passing through
on the way to eternity~ ~ ~
Comments from the Judges
“Warp” feels like it’s operating on two meanings. The physics of spacetime and the warp threads of weaving. That duality continues through the piece as breath, time, gravity, and human intimacy are all tangled together. “The frayed edge of the map” is a lovely phrase suggesting both ancient cartography and the edge of understanding. The closing is understated, ending with uncertainty; it leaves the reader with a sense that something is forming but not yet knowable. This haibun isn’t trying to tell a story so much as describe an experience of time, breath, love, and existence through the language of cosmology and weaving. It awards rereading because its images echo one another rather than opting for a single fixed meaning. What a fun piece that blends astrophysics and Zen philosophy into a surrealist haibun!
Honorable Mention:
by Rowan Beckett Minor, Lakewood, OH
Did you see the moon was painted black?
Death sits with me in the waiting room. The contractions have started and I know it won’t be too long before I have to start pushing. I’m not bleeding yet, but I know it won’t be long before that starts too. I begin crying, but Death takes my hand and squeezes it tight. I start pushing. Three screams in, I finally pass the amniotic sac and the placenta. I scoop my child in my palms and bring them to my chest. I try to sing a lullaby, but Death takes the child from me. I don’t even know if it was a boy or girl.
starless night
dark matter growing
on the ultrasound~ ~ ~
Comments from the Judges
This is a haunting haibun. It reads less like a literal birth scene and more like a miscarriage, or the birth of grief itself, with Death personified as a silent companion. The title immediately shifts the world as we know it into an unnatural state and prepares the reader for a reality where ordinary rules no longer apply. “Death sits with me in the waiting room.” Much like in Emily Dickinson’s poems, Death isn’t violent or theatrical—just a patient, quiet presence that makes the piece more unsettling. Death’s role is obscured throughout the poem. However, even in loss, the poet is not alone. The last line, “I don’t even know if it was a boy or girl,” lands hard because it avoids explanation. It conveys not only loss, but the loss of a future, a life unlived. The haiku is striking. The compression of cosmic imagery and medical imagery in a single breath. The ambiguity of dark matter makes it a rich metaphor for loss that reshapes a person’s world even when it can’t be fully seen. Overall, the piece works well because it does not explain its symbolism. Is Death a grief, a person, or a law?
About the Judges
Peg Cherrin-Myers (they/she) is a self-taught poet living in Michigan. Betrayed by their Midwest Hoosier background, they drive a pickup and dip peanut butter sandwiches into chili. Their useless skill is inducing goosebumps on command. Peg is a 2021 Trailblazer Contest finalist, a 2022 Touchstone Award winner for best haiku, a 2023 best microfiction nominee, a 2024 & 2025 Touchstone Award winner for best haibun, a Pushcart Prize nominee for 2024 & 2025, and a 2026 finalist for the Rhysling Award.
Colleen M. Farrelly (she/they) is a computational topologist based in Miami, FL, whose career was recently highlighted in Nature. Her first full haibun collection, The Haibun Laboratory, is forthcoming with Cuttlefish Poetry Series. She’s a multiple Pushcart nominee and grand prize winner of the 2026 confluence Poetry Prize. Outside of dedicated haikai journals, her recent hybrids appear or are forthcoming in Rattle, Consequence Forum, ANMLY, MacQueen’s Quinterly, About Place Journal, Always Crashing, petrichor, and Moon Park Review. Her current writing projects include haibun-inspired code poems, collaborative linked-form haibun, and tritina-haibun mashups.