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.

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).

The annual Peggy Willis Lyles Haiku Awards were inaugurated in 2013 under the aegis of The Heron’s Nest haiku journal in memory of Peggy Willis Lyles (1939–2010), leading American haiku poet and associate editor of The Heron’s Nest from 2002 through 2010. The Lyles Awards were immediately established as one of the most popular and competitive contests for English-language haiku, attracting 1,500–2,000 entries a year until 2020, when the number jumped over 2,200. Regulations for submissions and reports of contest winners as well as the judges’ comments are archived on The Heron’s Nest website.

This annual haiku competition was launched in 2003 in memory of longtime Modern Haiku editor Robert Spiess, who died in 2002. Each year one of Spiess’s “Speculations” is selected as a theme. Poets may submit up to five haiku. Typically three prizes and as many as five honorable mentions are chosen double-blind by one or two judges. In recent years the competition has drawn as many as 577 entries. Results, including the judges’ commentaries, are published in the summer issue of Modern Haiku following the contest.