Congratulations to the winners of the of the 2018 ukiaHaiku Festival Contest—A celebration and competition devoted to the haiku form of poetry in Ukiah, California.
Congrats to Christina Sng (Singapore) for first place, Iqra Raza (India) for second place, Debbie Strange (Manitoba) for third place, and to the following honourable mentions: Malgorzata Formanowska (Poland), Minh-Trit Pham (France), Sasa Vazic (Serbia), Martha Magenta (United Kingdom), and Jacqueline Pearce (British Columbia).
Read the winning haiku on Graceguts here.
Interesting facts about Ukiah, California. The name happens to be “haiku” spelled backwards, but that is happy circumstance. Ukiah is located within Rancho Yokaya, one of several Spanish colonial land grants in what was then called “Alta California”. The Yokaya grant, which covered the majority of the Ukiah valley, was named after the native American Pomo word meaning “deep valley.”
- “Ukiah” is the name and subject of a song on the 1973 Doobie Brothers album The Captain and Me.
- Ukiah is featured prominently in C.D. Payne‘s novel Youth in Revolt.
- Ukiah is briefly mentioned in the 1987 film Dragnet.
- Ukiah is one of six original locations of an International Latitude Observatory.
- Ukiah is featured in the 2016 Czech video game, American Truck Simulator.
- Ukiah is also well known as the home of the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas. Located east of Ukiah, the 488-acre (1.97 km2) temple is one of the largest Mahayana Buddhist communities in the Western Hemisphere. North of town is Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery, a community in the Thai Forest Tradition of Theravada Buddhism.
