2025 Touchstone Distinguished Books Award — Awarded and Honorable Mentions
2025 Touchstone Awards for Distinguished Books – Awarded and Honorable Mentions
The Haiku Foundation is pleased to announce the Touchstone Distinguished Books Award winners and honorable mentions for books of haiku and related forms published in 2025. The eighty-one books nominated for this year’s awards represent a rich variety of English-language books from many haiku traditions. Panel members read each book and then nominated ten books for consideration, which then composed the Long List. Through a series of votes and discussions, the panel members arrived at the Short List. Following another round of voting and discussion, the panel members selected four Award winners and three Honorable Mentions.
The Touchstone Long List and Short List included outstanding volumes of haiku and haibun showcasing a wide range of subject matter and themes and span a wide spectrum of styles from contemporary traditional and nature based works to experimental and language-based treatments.
I speak for the entire panel when I say that everyone recognized that each book on the Short List had great merit and can attest to the difficulty of distinguishing the ‘best’ among these books. The Awarded and Honorable Mentions reflect the panel’s assessment of the most noteworthy offerings from this year’s highly distinguished field. I wish to thank the Panel Members who read for a whole year to select the Touchstone Distinguished Books Award, Joyce Clement, Judson Evans, Edward Cody Huddleston, Christoper Patchel and Sharon Pretti. I appreciate their diligence, expertise and efforts.
Touchstone Distinguished Books Award Winners
Bennett, Brad. a rush of doves. (Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press, 2025).
Brickley, Chuck. downhill home. (Ormskirk, UK: Shapshot Press, 2025).
Hall, Carolyn. Pulling the Yarn. (Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press, 2025).
Lehmann, Kat. no matter how it ends a bluebird’s song. (Studio City, CA: Rattle 2025).
Honorable Mentions
Beary, Roberta. crazy bitches. (Winston-Salem, NC: Mac Q Press, 2025).
French, Terri L. kaleidoscope dream. (Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press, 2025).
Smith, Crystal Simone. Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025).
Bruce H. Feingold
Touchstone Chairperson and Touchstone Distinguished Book Award Coordinator
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Congratulations to the writers of these inspiring and wonderful books.
Congratulations to all the poets. While I have not read all, I definitely like the one I have read from Kat Lehman, a very deserving win.
Congratulations everyone! Well done!
Congrats to all & thanks to our judges! I’m sure this wasn’t an easy choice.
Congratulations to everyone. Humbled to be included and to have received an Honorable Mention.
Congratulations to Kat, the other winning authors.
Having visited William Wilberforce’s home in Hull (UK) it was a shock back then that (en)slavers never went away, they just worked it around politicians, law enforcement, and morality. And with recent revelations recently to show evil never goes away, it adapts.
Crystal Simone Smith reimagines the experiences of enslaved and formerly enslaved persons in a stark and chilling response to the archives of chattel slavery: bills of sale, interviews, narratives, and fugitive runaway ads.
Crystal Simone Smith’s Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025):
https://dukeupress.edu/runagate
A lot of powerful books here both in the placed category and the honourable mentions section.
Congratulations!!