In each issue throughout its six-year run, American Haiku, the first periodical outside Japan devoted entirely to haiku and senryu, awarded prizes to a number of poems chosen by the editors from subscribers’ submissions. Beginning with a contest in late 1962, the American Haiku Awards were the first regular competition for English-language haiku.

The Clement Hoyt Memorial Award was one of the early and most distinguished of the designations of excellence in haiku awarded by Modern Haiku. Begun under the editorship of Kay Titus Mormino, the award was first granted in the summer 1971 issue and ran through the summer of 1981, that is, into the editorship of Robert Spiess. The prize was named in honor of Clement Hoyt and underwritten by his widow, Violet Hoyt. Initially the award brought a cash prize of $5.00 but from 1977 onward was replaced by a volume of Hoyt’s collected haikai.

Japan Air Lines sponsored a haiku contest for poets in the United States in 1964. This was the first and by far the largest competition outside Japan; some 41,000 entries were received in 17 contests arranged by local radio stations. Prominent Zen specialist Alan Watts was the contest judge. Watts selected one National Winner and eighty-three semifinalists, whose winning haiku were published by JAL in a booklet, Haiku ’64. The 1964 JAL contest is commonly believed to have been the catalytic event in American haiku.

The Kaji Aso Studio and Institute for the Arts in Boston was founded in 1973 and serves as a center for the study of Japanese graphic and plastic arts as well as literature and poetry. The Boston Haiku Society first met at the studio in 1987, and the Kaji Aso Studio’s International Haiku Contest has been based there annually since 1988.

The annual Marlene Mountain Memorial Haiku Contest, based in the United States, was inaugurated in 2018 as a feature of #FemkuMag: an e-zine of haikai poetry by womxn and non-binary folkx and conducted by Lithica Ann (deadname: Lori A Minor), its founding editor. The contest commemorates the work of Marlene Mountain (1939–2018), a pioneering artist and haikai poet known for her innovative political and feminist poems, particularly one-line haiku (monoku).