How to Enter
the 2025 Tanka Prose Contest

Please Enter the Tanka Society of America Tanka Prose Contest

A 25th Anniversary Special Event: Call for Submissions

Submission Window: June 1 through July 31, 2025 (in-hand deadline).

Eligibility: Open to all, members and nonmembers alike, except TSA officers and the judge.

Regulations: Submit one tanka prose piece per contest entrant. A title and one to three tanka should be included. The prose portion should not exceed 300 words. Your entry must be original, in English, unpublished, and not simultaneously submitted for publication or to any other contest. Work posted to social media, blogs, websites, or public online discussion lists is not eligible for submission.

Entry Fee: None. This contest is free for both members and nonmembers.

Online Submissions: Please submit online using the online submission form. The form should work correctly for nearly everyone, but if it does not work for you, please try accessing it using a different device. For those who do NOT have email or Internet access, poems can be submitted by email, and must be received by July 31, 2025.

Email Submissions: We strongly prefer that you submit using our online submission form, but if it does not work correctly for you, you may submit by email. Please type or paste your tanka prose piece in the body of the message (no attached files) and include your name, address, email address, and phone number. If you are concerned about any special formatting characteristics, you may add a brief note of explanation.  Please write “Tanka Prose Contest —[your name]” in the subject line. Send by July 31, 2025 to the contest coordinator, Roy Kindelberger, at RoyKindelberger@roykindelberger.com.

Postal Submissions: For those who do NOT have email or Internet access, you can submit your tanka prose entry (to be received by July 31, 2025) to: 

Roy Kindelberger

21107 80th Ave. W #102

Edmonds, WA 98026 USA

Awards: . $100 for first prize, $50 for second prize, and $25 for third prize, plus honorable mentions.

Announcements: Winners will be personally contacted. Announcements will be made online and in Ribbons. Winning tanka prose pieces will be published with the judge’s comments on the TSA website.

Adjudication: Our judge for this contest is John Budan.

John Budan is an octogenarian who has published Japanese poetic forms for more than five decades. His collection of haibun, Just Enough Moon, came out in 2023. His second book, Before the Rules: Tanka and Tanka Prose, followed in 2024. He was a paratrooper and merchant seaman before earning a nursing degree along with a master’s degree in counseling psychology from the University of Texas. Budan is now a retired psychiatric nurse. He lives with his wife in Oregon’s Willamette Valley in a natural habitat they've created to preserve oaks and other native plants and wildlife.

Rights: All rights revert to the authors after publication on the TSA website.

We look forward to receiving your tanka prose. Contact the contest coordinator if you have any questions: RoyKindelberger@roykindelberger.com.

If you’re not a TSA member, we invite you to visit our How to Join or Renew page.

To see results from our previous tanka prose contest, see  2015 Tanka Prose Contest Winners.