Attention teachers and students interested in our Haiku Society of America Virgilio scholarship contest: We have just posted to our YouTube channel a workshop led by Tom Painting on writing contemporary haiku. Tom is an American junior high school humanities teacher and haiku poet, teaching at the Paideia School in Atlanta, Georgia. His students have had winning haiku in blind judging of thousands of entries in the Nicholas Virgilio Memorial Haiku Contest since 2000.

Tom’s online workshop is tailored to introducing modern haiku to students. It explores the basics of composing and crafting haiku in English, the power of image to evoke emotion and the ways artful juxtaposition can create the haiku “ah-ha” moment. Attendees explore excellent examples of haiku in English by students in junior high to learn what to expect from students of different age groups. Discussions explore seasonal awareness and the understanding of kigo to further enhance haiku knowledge, as well as haiku and senryu relationships to nature and human nature in ways both serious and humorous.

Tom’s own haiku have appeared annually since 1998 in the Red Moon anthologies of English-language haiku as well as in Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written About the Game (2007), A New Resonance 2: Emerging Voices in English-language Haiku (2001), and Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (2013), among others. Painting has also received recognition in the Haiku Society of America’s haiku, senryu, and haibun contests and is an associate editor for The Heron’s Nest haiku journal.

We encourage any students who would like to submit to our annual haiku and senryu contest to view this online workshop! There’s so much for teachers and students of the craft, alike. Take a look at Tom Painting’s recorded session here.