2026 (Not) in Love Haiku Challenge

The 2026 (Not) in Love Haiku Challenge 

"Stronger than lover's love is lover's hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.”

―Euripides, Medea (trans. John Davie)

We understand that the Valentine’s Day season—the candy hearts, Hallmark quotes, and the flood of partners to the flower section to buy overpriced red roses—can be taxing. Some feel less Nicholas Sparks-esque and more in the realm of a Stephen King horror. A dedicated time to appreciate love is great but the near-constant pressure to find or express love can sometimes dredge up old flings we'd rather forget—that we find sickening upon reflection. Here at Frontier Poetry, we’re looking for something a little more bitter, vengeful and potent.

In that spirit, Frontier Poetry is thrilled to announce the 2026 (Not) in Love Haiku Challenge. 

The challenge opens on February 5th, 2026, and closes on February 15th, 2026.

For this ten-day challenge, Frontier seeks poetry written as Haiku—a Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five. While traditional haiku typically engages the natural world, we’re looking for risk taking, experimentation, and surprise as you work in this classic form. Send us poems that would provoke Saint Valentine. We’re looking for poetry that explores the people, places, and things you have a love-hate relationship with. Consider this a condensed version of your lengthier diss track; we can't wait to listen!

Explore examples of haiku poems below:

• Untitled/無題 | The Poetry Foundation
• Malu Cycles/瑪璐循環 | Poetry Foundation
• David Trinidad (Basho) | Unwoven Literary Mag
• [goes out comes back] | The Poetry Foundation 
• [all the time I pray to Buddha] | The Poetry Foundation 

Guidelines:

• The challenge will open on February 5th, 2026, and close on February 15th, 2026.
• Three winners will be chosen by our editorial staff. The first-place winner will receive $500, with the second- and third-place winners receiving $200 and $100, respectively. All winners will be published on Frontier’s website.
• For this challenge, submissions are open to new and emerging poets with no more than one full-length work of poetry published or forthcoming at the time of submission.
• Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
• Send up to five poems per submission. Simply, all five poems must be haiku.
• Please submit previously unpublished poems only.
• We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
• You may submit multiple times, but each submission (of up to five haiku poems) requires a separate $10 fee.
• Please provide a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history, as well as any applicable content warnings to safeguard our reading staff.
• Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing primarily in English. Code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
• If you haven’t already, please verify your email address with Submittable for more consistent communication.
• We will not accept AI-generated or -assisted work for this challenge. Such work will be automatically disqualified.
• If you have any questions, please visit our FAQ page first. If you don’t find the answer to your question, you can send an email to contact (at) frontierpoetry (dot) com.

Editorial Feedback Option:

This option costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback on one poem in your submission, including suggestions for future submissions. The $149 option will provide you with three letters from three different editors. Our guest editors are paid a significant portion of the fee and all are astute and professional poets. Please note, the time frame for editorial letters is eight to twelve weeks from the close of the challenge.