Hot Tomato Haiku Contest Winners 2009
If you missed the presentation at the Tomato Art Fest this weekend (pictures coming soon), here are the winners of this year’s Hot Tomato Haiku Contest. It was an extraordinarily close race with over 400 entries, but the following haiku stood out among their categories. (Category descriptions are at our Haiku 2009 page.)
Congratulations to our winners and a very special thank-you to our judges–Bonnie Smith, Danielle Alexander, and David Curtis–all of Belmont’s English Dept. If you’d like to sign up to receive an email before next year’s contest, visit our Haiku 2010 page.
Basho’s Beefsteak Winner
by Julie Greenberg
Brandywine fever
finds me circling the garden,
hoping I missed one.
Plum Humorous Winner
by Amy E. Hall
Pastor Bruce Shetta
to marry Tobas Coe and
Miss Mary Nara
Stinky Tomato Winner
by John Cooper
Distant Tomato
You can run but you can’t hide
Time to play ketchup
Fried Green Winner
by Allie McGilberry, 9 years old
Orange, red and yellow,
Thou art a fruit I must eat.
I want to eat thee.
Melissa Duke’s Best in Show
by Gregory O’Loughlin
I trained vines for you
Cages could not hold your wild
Cherokee purple
Juicy Red Honorable Mention
by Libby Neutrino
Red moon over the silent hill
tonight I dream
of a Better Boy
Hot Tomato Haiku Contest: 2008 Winner
This year’s Hot Tomato Haiku Contest is really heating up. We’d like to say a special thanks to our friends for helping spread the word on Twitter, Facebook, Craigslist, and everywhere else.
We also just took delivery of the file containing last year’s entries and winners. Last year’s contest did not use the same categories, but there was one overall winner. Unfortunately, the file does not include the names of each entrant. We have no idea who submitted what. If you see your haiku in this list, would you email us so we can credit you?
Without further ado, we present some haiku from last year’s contest, including the overall winner.
The Entrants
frost in the forecast –
my neighbor’s tomato plants
wear grocery bags
seedy part of town
ripe with saucy folk in red –
East Nashville August
Indian summer –
tomatoes splitting their skins
on neglected vines
color has odor
just touch a tomato plant
you will smell fresh green
I hate tomatoes
I think they are very gross
It’s opposite day
summer lake picnic –
her children eat tomatoes
whole, one in each hand
Blossom rot you scourge
My Silvery Fir for naught,
O temp’rate dog days
The Winner
Salmonella suspect
The jalepeno’s scapegoat
Vindication now
2009 Hot Tomato Haiku Contest
How is it possible I haven’t blogged about this yet? Too busy promoting it, I guess!
BookFool.com is now hosting the Hot Tomato Haiku Contest, a part of the burgeoning Tomato Art Fest in East Nashville. This is the second year of the contest, begun in 2008 by Melissa Duke Mooney, who passed away earlier this year. Her husband Neil says her original idea was to bind tomato-related haiku into a tomato-shaped book. When life got busy, however, the project morphed into a haiku contest, which drew hundreds of entries.
We’re thrilled to be sponsoring the contest in Melissa’s honor this year. It’s the perfect mix of Foolishness, literary aspiration, food obsession, and local pride. Oh, and did I mention the grand prize is an iPod Touch? Five category winners will receive gift certificates to local shops, and we’re considering a 6th category for haiku submitted during the festival.
Much more info is available at the Contest page here. This year’s deadline is July 31st. Enter today!
PSST!
Would you do me a huge favor and tell your people about this contest? Post it to Facebook, email it to friends, and/or print the flyer and hang a few up at your work. Anything you can do to get the word out would be most appreciated.
