Billboard Poetry

Write your Humanity

We invited budding and established poets from across our community to submit a haiku for our third annual Billboard Poetry competition.

Throughout August 2026, selected poems from the competition spread joy on billboards across Melbourne.

Interested in writing your own haiku and want inspiration? Watch Maxine Beneba Clarke exploring the history and form of haiku, and discover examples of previous Billboard Poetry winners below!

Billboard Poetry is supported by the Melbourne Public Humanities Initiative.

Andy Jackson

Meet our Billboard Poetry champion

Andy Jackson is a poet, essayist, and lecturer in creative writing at the University of Melbourne. His poetry collection Human Looking won the ALS Gold Medal and the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry. Andy's poems are included in the anthologies Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets (Bloodaxe, UK, 2025) and Every Place on the Map is Disabled (Northwestern University Press, USA, 2026). He is a co-editor of Raging Grace: Australian Writers Speak Out on Disability (Puncher & Wattman 2024), and he writes and rests on Dja Dja Wurrung country.

Haiku: small but mighty
Maxine Beneba Clarke

Watch Maxine, inaugural Peter Steele Poet in Residence, and instigator of Billboard Poetry, as she gives a short history of the haiku and tips for writing.

The beauty of a haiku lies in its unpredictability. It’s not exactly what you think it is.

Maxine is an Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent, and is the multi-award-winning author of over fifteen published books for children and adults, including the poetry collection Carrying The World, which won the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her latest poetry collection How Decent Folk Behave was also shortlisted for the award in 2022. In 2024 her play The Hate Race (based on her bestselling book) premiered at The Malthouse theatre to sold out audiences.

Theme: IN REAL LIFE

Our 2026 Billboard Poetry theme is IN REAL LIFE. This symbolises our increasing need to live authentically in a world that has become mediated by screens and algorithms. We invited poets to think about shared spaces, fleeting moments of interaction, the blurring of the virtual and the real world and the separation between what is public and what is private.
We hope the haikus might inspire connection and meaning making. You might even consider the very small gesture of noticing, leaving time for meditation through words. Our haikus are published both digitally and IRL on billboards across Melbourne.

Our 2026 Poets

Vanessa Konieczka
Student at Bayside College

Haiku reads: Please open yourself, Face me while vulnerable, Be human with me

Alyssa McInerney
Student at Lowther Hall

Haiku reads: Dappled light through trees, Wind whispers by old doorways, Book rests on my knee

Veronica Troup
Emerging poet

Haiku reads: cicada summer, splayed back on warm concrete, ash clouds gather

Rani Hansen
Alum, Bachelor of Arts (Honours)

Haiku reads: You had desires, before the algorithm, told you what they were

Phil Maude
Alum, Doctor of Philosophy - Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences

Haiku reads: Names once thrown like stones, glitter now in chosen light, queer blooms from the wound

Katherine Firth
Interim Head, International House

Haiku reads: The dining hall waits, between meals, a sparrow flits, from chair to empty chair

Zoe Keeghan
Library Service Officer, Baillieu Library

Haiku reads: Our teeth sink into loukmades. Honeyed laughs hold us tightly-here.

Maddison Miller (Dharug)
Lecturer, Ecological Knowledges of Country, Faculty of Science

Haiku reads: the land is longing, spilling her sovereign waters, Birrarung unfurls

Keely Boyle
Current student, Master of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing

Haiku reads: A cat with old bones, sits near a sunlit window. You try not to stare.

Cecily de Gooyer
Current student, Bachelor of Fine Arts (Music Theatre)

Haiku reads: Faces flow like stars, orbiting all alone, on the silent tram

Marshall Matthews
Current student, Bachelor of Arts

Haiku reads: No, it was a sneeze. Can we relight the candles? What about my wish?

Dhruv Patel
Current student, Bachelor of Commerce

Haiku reads: Tram doors slide open- a hundred faces look up from a hundred screens
Manisha Anjali standing next to her poem which reads abyssal egress blue dissidence of psyche pelagic image

Peter Steele Poetry Award
Recipient 2026

Manisha Anjali

Manisha is a poet and artist. She is the author of Naag Mountain (Giramondo, 2024), which was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. Her work has appeared in the Mascara Literary Review, Seizure, IKA Journal, Blackmail Press and Lor Journal.

Manisha Anjali was commissioned to produce her haiku as the Peter Steele Poetry Award recipient.

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti