Organizations

Every year on July 12, the anniversary of the founding of the American Haiku Archives in 1996, the AHA advisory board appoints an honorary curator to serve a one-year term. This curatorship carries no responsibilities and offers no financial compensation, but seeks to honor prominent poets, scholars, and translators who have had a significant impact on haiku in North America.

A haiku club in Bulgaria’s second-largest city, Plovdiv, was established in 2003 through the efforts of Ivanka Yankova, Todor Bikov, and Dimitar Stefanov. The Haiku Club Plovdiv currently has 20 members, primarily from Plovdiv province and including the city of Asenovgrad. Members meet about six times a year to read and discuss their own work and classical Japanese haiku as well as study other aspects of Japanese culture and literature and learn about developments in haiku elsewhere in the world.

Haiku North America is a series of conferences held every two years at venues around North America. Growing steadily since the first gathering in 1991, Haiku North America events have attracted more than 200 attendees in recent years, including poets and scholars from four countries in North America, Japan, Australia, and several European nations. HNA is believed to be the largest and most diverse conferences outside Japan devoted to haiku and related forms.

The Illawong Haiku Group was formed by Carol Reynolds and first met in Sydney, Australia, in June 2017. Meetings take place seasonally in a venue that is suitable for a ginkō and typically include haiku writing or discussion exercises.

The Los Altos Writers Roundtable was the first group of poets in America devoted exclusively to the composition and study of English-language haiku. Helen Stiles Chenoweth established the writers’ group in Los Altos, California, as early as 1956. Fourteen of the women, all from the San Francisco Bay area, began serious study of haiku in 1964. The group’s 1966 collection, Borrowed Water, is believed to have been the earliest anthology of original English-language haiku.