Tiffany Shaw-Diaz — Touchstone Award for Individual Poems Winner 2021

Tiffany Shaw-Diaz is the recipient of a Touchstone Award for Individual Poems for 2021 for her poem

not every color
has a name . . .
midnight jazz
— (Stardust Haiku 50)

Commentary from the Panel:

This haiku imbues the reader with multiple sensations and transports them across barriers of time and space. How does the poet accomplish this? By linking the notes of a haiku, its musicality, to the genre of jazz. On one level, these three lines can be read as a definition of jazz. The use of the ellipsis in line two, a notation also used by composers, invokes images of musical memory. For this reader, they are of a jazz solo heard first on a record player and later in a basement jazz club. But what sets this haiku apart is that its myriad notes continue to play long after an initial reading. Whether read silently or aloud, this evocative haiku is its own musical form.

See the complete list of winners of both Individual Poem Awards and Distinguished Books Awards in the Touchstone Archives.