Submissions are open for the Insect Museum’s annual Hexapod Haiku Challenge.

The challenge encourages participants to write Japanese poetry with a thematic focus on insects.

The challenge will accept poetry in the forms of haiku, haiga, or senryu. A haiku is an unrhymed poem broken into three lines of five, seven, and five syllables that has a nature theme. A haiga is a haiku that includes a picture or graphic. A senryu is typically a satirical poem on humanity.

According to Andy Dean, an assistant professor in entomology, the haiku style was chosen because of its short and somewhat standardized format. Dean also chose the style because most people are familiar with it and it would be easier for the judges to critique them.

Dean said that hexapods, an insect species including springtails, diplurans and proturans, deserve recognition for their impact on the ecosystem. One of themain reasons for this contest is that hexapods are going unnoticed, according to Dean.

“My hope was that a poetry contest would get people thinking about how they, and how nature interacts with insects. I also wanted to raise awareness of the NCSU Insect Museum which maintains a vast and important collection of insect specimens from around the world,” he said.

“People are too quick to fear or loathe insects. Someone remembers the one time a bee stung him or her back in fifth grade but forgets all the thousands of times bees pollinated the strawberries and peaches he or she ate over the years,” Dean said. “People get creeped out by the cockroach that crawls back into the storm drain, but they don’t realize that fundamental discoveries in physiology and sociality resulted from basic research on cockroaches. There are myriad reasons people should learn more about insects.”

Dean said in regard to the difference between this year’s and last year’s competition, “There is no difference except that I’ve made more of an effort to promote the contest to kids under 13. Last year we didn’t get any haikus from kids.” 


Dean began the competition in 2008. The first year there were 87 contestants and last year there were 102 contestants. 
Last year’s winner was Marek Kozubek of Zywiec, Poland.

There are three awards: Best Entry by poet under the age of 13, Best in Show, and Runner-up. All submissions are due by March 20 at 11:59 p.m.