Janice M Bostok Haiku Award
Janice M Bostok Haiku Award: A New International Contest
It is with great pleasure that Paper Wasp announces that it will honour Australia’s greatest haiku poet, the late Janice M Bostok, with a new international haiku award.
The Janice M Bostok Award will replace the long-running Jack Stamm contest which honoured the Japan-based American beat generation haiku poet who was part of a Japanese initiative to reinvigorate Australian haiku in the late 1980s.
The Janice M Bostok Award will be inaugurated with the announcement of award details in several languages on international haiku websites in April.
The new award will be truly international in scope and looks forward to attracting the very best of haiku from around the world – in keeping with Janice’s recognition as a truly international haiku poet and as a fitting memorial to her decades of dedication to promoting not only the development of an Australian haiku voice but also her work on behalf of English language haiku as a global art form.
Fittingly, the judging panel will be led by one of Janice’s colleagues and admirers, the multi-award winning haiku poet Jim Kacian, founder of The Haiku Foundation.
As with the Jack Stamm contest, all entries will be in the English language and anthologies produced from the award will be lodged with various state libraries, the National Library in Canberra and with the Tokyo library of the Museum of Haiku Literature in Japan to ensure a permanent record is retained for posterity.