Billboard Poetry
Write your Humanity
We're inviting budding and established poets from across our community to submit a haiku for our third annual Billboard Poetry competition. Our winning poets received $250.
Throughout August, our poems spread joy on billboards across Melbourne.
Submissions close at 11:45pm on 8 July
Enter a haiku now!
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.
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 2025 Poets
Ava Brown, current student, Bachelor of Arts (Honours)
Emma-Rose, current student, Bachelor of Arts
Ingrid D, alum, Bachelor of Optometry (2013)
David M. A. Francis, alum, Master of Surgery and PhD (Arts)
Lauren S, student at Viewbank Primary School
Matty Hargreaves, video editor
Meron Samson, current student, Bachelor of Arts
Samuel, alum, Faculty of Arts
Sarah, Communications Coordinator, The University of Melbourne
Olivia A, artist and haiga poet
Sofija Rukmane, high school student
Xiaoyu K, current student, Master of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing
Peter Steele Poetry Award Recipient 2025
Miriam Webster
Miriam Webster lives in Naarm/Melbourne, where she writes fiction, essays and poetry. Her writing on love, death, desire and strange creatures has appeared in exhibitions, journals, books, online and on the sides of buildings, including publications like Aniko Magazine, HEAT, Island, Overland, The Suburban Review, swim meet lit mag and certain zines. She has been a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow (2022) and her work has been recognised in major Australian literary prizes like the Calibre Essay Prize (2022), the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize (2022), the Olga Masters Short Story Award (2022), The KYD Nonfiction Essay Prize (2023) and, most recently, the Griffith Review Emerging Voices Competition (2025). She is currently working on a novel as part of a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne and has just released her first book with indie publisher Aniko Press, a collection of short stories called The Slip.
She turns up the wick
Of her personality.
Night arrives in style. Miriam Webster
Miriam Webster was commissioned to produce this haiku as the Peter Steele Poetry Award recipient.
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti