Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland) are delighted to announce the winner of the Hay(na)ku Poetry Book Prize competition:

          Reporting Live from You Know Where by Sheila E. Murphy

ISBN No.: 9781934299128
Release Date: 2018
Pages: 70
Price: $15.00
Distributors: Meritage Press (meritagepress at gmail dot com), Amazon.com, Lulu.com

We’re also delighted to share an engagement with Sheila E. Murphy’s Reporting Live From You Know Where, viz an exchange with Nathaly Herrera and Thomas Fink at the ever-innovative Dichtung Yammer (March s, 2019)!

We are also delighted to congratulate the Runner-Up:

          Self-Construct Sequences: Varieties of Hay(na)ku by Sheri Reda

The competition was judged anonymously (no authors’ names on manuscripts) by Vince Gotera, Jean Vengua, and Mark Young. About the winning manuscripts, the judges say:

The judges of the Hay(na)ku Poetry Book Prize are pleased to announce the winner: Sheila Murphy’s Reporting Live From You Know Where. The “virtuoso performance” (as one of the judges commented) evident in Murphy’s hay(na)ku collection—essentially one long poem—was satisfying both intellectually and experimentally; it pushes the boundaries of the form, while contemplating the current mess we’re in and “reporting” on, among other things, our diminished state of governance:

an equivalent America

blistered with

false

 

history

erected to

unteach our children

Yet its explorations do not obscure its heart; the raw edges of emotion are revealed, often as a longing to be “fully healed” as the poet reacts to the conflicted and drastically changing world we find ourselves in, where “nothing/seems safe/according to gossip.”

It’s perhaps a cliché to say that the choice between the top two was difficult, but it’s true. One judge noted that Sheri Reda’s Self-Construct Sequences was in many ways a collection “about hay(na)ku—what it can accomplish, what it can portray—as much as it is made of hay(na)ku…a tour de force in itself.”

Although we are settled on our final choice of Reporting from You Know Where, we are also honored by the considerable efforts and expertise presented in the top two manuscripts, and indeed by the other submissions to the Hay(na)ku Poetry Prize, whose work is not mentioned here. They are evidence of the continuing relevance of the hay(na)ku form today.

Sheila E. Murphy’s book will be published later in 2018. Check this site for updates!

ABOUT THE HAY(NA)KU POETS

Sheila E. Murphy is an American text and visual poet who has been writing and publishing actively since 1978. She is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Murphy is known for working in forms including ghazals, haibun, and pantoums in her individual writing. As an active collaborator, she has worked with numerous writers in long poems spanning multiple volumes. Murphy’s visual work, both individual and collaborative, is shown in galleries and in private collections. Initially trained in instrumental and vocal music, her work is often associated with music in its language and rhythmic pulse. Murphy earns her living as an organizational consultant, speaker, and researcher and holds the PhD degree. She has lived in Phoenix, Arizona throughout her adult life. Sheila E. Murphy’s Wiki Page.

Sheri Reda is a writer, editor, performer, and librarian who also maintains a practice as a Master Life-Cycle Celebrant.  Her degrees—in Modern Letters, Religions and the Arts, and Information Sciences—support her voracious appetite for creative endeavor. Sheri performs stories at venues throughout the Chicago area and cherishes her continued association with the Neo-Futurists.  Her book of political poems, entitled Stubborn, is available to order through Moria Press.

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ORIGINAL CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Meritage Press (San Francisco & St. Helena) and xPress(ed) (Finland) are delighted to announce a Hay(na)ku Poetry Book Prize!

No submission fee is required. The hay(na)ku is open to all.

Details:
Prize for a Single-Author Hay(na)ku Poetry Book
Judges: Vince Gotera, Jean Vengua and Mark Young
Deadline: December 31, 2017
Email manuscript to: meritagepress@gmail.com
Information on the Hay(na)ku: https://eileenrtabios.com/haynaku/
Contact for More Information: Eileen Tabios at meritagepress@gmail.com

Structure:
—A manuscript of 40-80 pages of hay(na)ku
—Contents can be all text and/or combine with visual poetry (but visual images can only be reproduced in black and white)
—Cover page with contact information of Name and Email Address
—No name or other identifying information elsewhere on the manuscript

Prizes:
Book Publication
U.S. $333.33
33 Author Copies
33% Author’s Discount off of retail price for additional Author Copies
(1 + 2 + 3 =) 6 Books: THE HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY Vol. II, THE CHAINED HAY(NA)KU PROJECT, and single-author hay(na)ku collections by Ernesto Priego (the first single-author hay(na)ku collection), William Allegrezza, Eileen Tabios, and the HAY(NA)KU 15th Year Anniversary Anthology.

Selected hay(na)ku from finalists may be reprinted in a separate anthology.

Description:
The hay(na)ku is a 21^st century, diasporic poetic form invented by Eileen R. Tabios and named by Vince Gotera. The basic tercet presents the first line as one word, the second line as two words, and the third line as three words. The words can be as long or short as desired by the poet. Information about the hay(na)ku is available at https://eileenrtabios.com/haynaku/ . Notwithstanding its basic form, the hay(na)ku is also open to variations—examples of such variations are available at https://eileenrtabios.com/haynaku/haynaku-variations/. You may also create your own variation (in which case, please make a “Note” describing the variation’s concept.)

Since its inauguration in 2003, poets as well as visual artists from around the world have picked up on the form as originally conceived as well as to offer variations. As of 2016, the hay(na)ku has appeared in numerous literary journals, the anthology Best American Poetry, and nearly 70 single-author poetry collections including 12 dedicated only to the hay(na)ku form as well as an all-Finnish hay(na)ku book. The form also has generated three different anthologies edited by six different editors, including judges Jean Vengua and Mark Young.

Judges:
Vince Gotera

Bio as Hay(na)ku Sonnet

Poet,
fiction writer,
creative nonfictionist, critic.

Dragonfly,
Ghost Wars,
Fighting Kite . . . more.

English
professor, editor,
North American Review.

Musician:
lead guitar,
bass, drums, voice.

Namer, godfather: hay(na)ku.
Inventor: hay(na)ku sonnet.

Jean Vengua is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of Prau, a collection of experimental poetry (for which she received the Filamore Tabios, Sr., Memorial Prize (2007, Meritage Press)), and The Aching Vicinities (chapbook, Otoliths Press). With Mark Young, she co-edited The First Hay(na)ku Anthology, and The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol. II. In the mid 1990s, Elizabeth H. Pisares and Jean Vengua formed Tulitos Press and published and edited the Debut: the Making of a Filipino American Film by Gene Cajayon and John Manal Castro, and The Flipside by Rod Pulido. Her poetry and essays have been published in many journals and anthologies. She is editor of the literary/art journal, Local Nomad (www.local-nomad.net) and her art is featured on Okir Analog (https://okiranalog.wordpress.com/paintings/). Jean lives in Monterey, CA.

Mark Young is the editor of Otoliths, lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia, & has been publishing poetry for almost sixty years. He is the author of over thirty-five books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, & art history. His work has been widely anthologized, & his essays & poetry translated into a number of languages. His most recent books are Mineral Terpsichore, from gradient books of Finland, & The Chorus of the Sphinxes, from Moria Books in Chicago.  An e-book, The Holy Sonnets unDonne, came out earlier this year from Red Ceilings Press; another, a few geographies, will be out later this year from One Sentence Poems; & another, For the Witches of Romania, is scheduled for publication by Beard of Bees.