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.

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.

The New Orleans Haiku Society was founded in early 2002 by Johnette Downing and David G. Lanoue; it disbanded in 2016. Monthly meetings at the Milton Latter Public Library were open to the public. Attendees shared their haiku and other poetry, especially renga, and members published a collection of haiku, Katrina-ku: Storm Poems (2006) and two mini-chapbooks. At its peak the society had 11 regular attendees.

Route 9 Haiku Group is a small, exclusive local haiku group based in the Capital District of Upstate New York. It was founded in 2000 by Hilary Tann, Yu Chang, and John Stevenson and later joined by Tom Clausen and Ion Codrescu. The group meets monthly, usually in the Tai Pan restaurant in Halfmoon, N.Y., which specializes in dim sum (Chinese dumplings), and which in turn suggested the name of the group's biannual haiku journal, Upstate Dim Sum.

The Santa Fe Haiku Study Group was an informal circle of haiku poets and friends organized in January 2015 by Sondra J. Byrnes and Charles Trumbull in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The group initially met monthly (later quarterly), in one or another branch of the Santa Fe Public Library, with one meeting a year at a member’s home in Santa Fe or Albuquerque. The group disbanded in July 2021.