Library Hotel’s 2nd Annual Poetry Month Haiku Challenge

The Library Hotel Collection is a huge enthusiast of all literary related events so last year we decided to take our love of poetry to the next level and celebrate Poetry Month, which is in April, with a Haiku Challenge! We sent out announcements on Twitter and Facebook that asked our followers to tweet @LibraryHotel their original #haiku, making sure to include #PoetryMonth, for a chance to win a free two night stay in the Poetry Room 800.003. We were overwhelmed by everyone’s eagerness to participate and excited to receive over 190 wonderful entries that first year! It wasn’t easy to pick our favorite but our panel of literary experts selected @AnimeJune’s haiku as the winner of the 2013 Haiku Challenge!

Based on last year’s success, we decided to make it an annual Haiku Challenge so for 2014, we made sure to add some exciting twists! With the goal in mind that we wanted to surpass last year’s number of haiku entrants, we raised the stakes and asked that all participants tweet us haiku that included one of our favorite topics: books, travel, or spring in New York City. A more difficult challenge meant that we also offered an even better Grand Prize! In addition to a free two night stay in the Poetry Room 800.003, we also added $100 towards dining at Madison & Vine, and two fantastic poetry anthologies! The anthologies were kindly donated by our Poetry Partners, Tweetspeak Poetry and Best American Poetry. Tweetspeak Poetry donated How to Read a Poem: Based on the Billy Collins Poem “Introduction to Poetry” by Tania Runyan and Best American Poetry donated a copy of The Best of the Best American Poetry with Guest Editor, Robert Pinsky and Senior Editor, David Lehman.

If you didn’t get a chance to see all of the 365 haiku that were submitted, you should definitely check them out! Not only were we thrilled to showcase all the creative haiku submitted by our followers but we were also able to channel a little bit of spring in New York City; the beautiful backdrops for the haiku were images of flourishing blooms provided by Brooklyn Botanic Garden!

There were so many beautiful, creative, and insightful haiku so as you can imagine, our literary panel had an extremely difficult time picking one haiku that deserved the Grand Prize. In order to give us a little more time to deliberate (and also add that exciting twist that was mentioned earlier!), we created a Winner’s Circle, which featured all of the haiku being considered for the Grand Prize, and also asked the public to “Like” their favorite to determine a Popular Vote winner. With 161 “Likes” @maryecronin was the winner of the Popular Vote (read her haiku here) with @glmclark and @graceappears as the First and Second Runners-up, respectively.

Finally, the big announcement was made on May 9th…more than 30 days after the challenge had started! The Grand Prize was awarded to @QuasiWallflower (read her haiku here), whose stunning haiku truly invoked the feeling of love and included one of our favorite topics: books! @Arrrrstar was our First Runner-up, closely followed by @GOTFilms. Congratulations to all of our winners! We only wish we had more Grand Prizes to give out!

Thank you again to our Poetry Partners and to everyone who participated in the 2014 Poetry Month Haiku Challenge! If you missed out this year, don’t worry, it’s never too early to start coming up with your haiku submissions for our 2015 Haiku Challenge. If this year’s competition is any indication of what’s to come then let the countdown begin!