NaHaiWriMo Takes a Village

Post date: Feb 14, 2020 6:5:19 PM

On this day of love, Valentine’s Day, I extend my gratitude and love to each of the following prompters for ten years of haiku inspiration. Over its ten-year history, NaHaiWriMo has had 103 different daily writing prompters. This includes people participating in three pass-the-baton months that had a different prompter every day. In addition, many of these volunteers have prompted for multiple months, such as Patty Hardin, who has provided prompts for NaHaiWriMo eight times. NaHaiWriMo would not be the thriving community it is were it not for these daily prompts that keep us inspired all year long—for ten years now.

Some highlights of this time include our progression through the alphabet from January 2014 to February of 2016, where every prompt for each month started with a particular letter of the alphabet (some of those letters made it tough to come up with 28, 30, or 31 prompts!). And we all endured a sad time in January of 2014 when Kat Creighton died halfway through her month of prompting (her last prompt was “apartheid”), and Scott Abeles took over by sharing haiku, tanka, and photo-haiga by Kat to inspire us for the rest of that month. Kat was also the very first person to respond to the “Meet the Prompters” interview questions, posted just a few days before she died, a new feature on the website that started in 2014. Through all our ups and downs, a process that haiku is perfect to embrace, I’m grateful to the worldwide village of haiku poets who help to make NaHaiWriMo a welcoming home for haiku sharing. Please join me in thanking the following NaHaiWriMo daily writing prompters from its first ten years.