Susan Burch, an award-winning poet from the United States, is to act as Guest Judge for the IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award 2017.

IAFOR is pleased to announce the appointment of award-winning US poet Susan Burch as Guest Judge of the IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award 2017. Susan’s selection of up to five haiku will be published online and in the IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award Anthology, alongside Drago Štambuk’s selection of the Grand Prize Winner, Runners Up and Commended entries.

Susan will make her selection based on the theme of “History, Story, Narrative”. This is the conference theme of The Asian Conference on Literature 2017, which will host the award ceremony for the IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award 2017. Susan’s guidelines for this theme can be found in the section below.

Submitting to the theme of “History, Story, Narrative” is optional. All haiku submissions, including those submitted to the theme, will be considered for Dr Drago Štambuk’s Grand Prize, Runners Up and Commended selections. Only one entry to the competition is permitted per person.

If you would like to submit your entry to the theme of “History, Story, Narrative”, please select this option on the dropdown menu of the submission form. Susan will make her selection based on the haiku submitted to this theme.

IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award 2017 Theme: “History, Story, Narrative”

By Susan Burch

It is clear that everything we have done is history, and everything we are doing now is making history. So to narrow down this theme, I am giving you several options from which to choose:

  1. Write a haiku about one moment in your own personal history that you will never forget.
  2. Rewrite something in your own history to reflect the way you would have liked it to have turned out, or the way it would have changed your life if it had happened differently.
  3. Imagine yourself as someone in history and write a haiku from that person’s point of view. This could be one of your ancestors or someone unrelated to you. Please indicate whose point of view it is if you choose this option.

My two rules are as follows:

  1. Please do not write about current events. Please make sure that whatever you write about occurred in the past.
  2. Please submit all haiku in English. (If your haiku is selected, you may provide a translation in another language at that time.)

I want you to make me live it, to experience your haiku. You can use sight, sound, scent, taste, and/or touch to help your haiku become more vivid. I am looking for haiku that evoke strong emotions and that will make me think about them days after I have read them. I know this is challenging to do in only three lines, but please give it a try. After all, someone has to win – why not you?

Susan Burch: Biography

Susan Burch is an award-winning poet from the United States. In 2014 she was runner-up in the IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award, and she won Third Place in the Haiku Society of America’s Gerald Brady Senryu Contest. In 2015 she won First Place in the Golden Haiku Contest and Silver (second) Prize in the Ito-En Art of Haiku Contest. In 2016 she won the Maiden Kukai of Bangladesh and received an Honorable Mention in the Matsuo Basho Festival Haiku Contest. In addition, she served as the judge for the First Annual Senryu Contest hosted by the journal Sonic Boom, and has won various awards for her tanka poetry. Susan resides in Hagerstown, Maryland, United States, with her husband and daughter, and loves to read and do puzzles. Read more about Susan here.