The 9th Basho-an International English Haiku Competition

Via our Artist in Residence, Hikari, Literary Revelations has been invited to share a wonderful opportunity from Mrs. Kakutani Masako, Director of the International Division at The Association of Haiku Poets.

Following the global reception of our poetry anthologies—including Haiku for Soulmates, which was recently shared with educators and poets at the English Haiku Program in Matsuyama—the Basho Memorial Museum has reached out to our press.

As the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Literary Revelations together with our Artist in Residence Hikari, we warmly invite you—our anthology contributors, readers, and global community of haiku poets —to submit your original work to this prestigious competition.

Submission Guidelines:

Language: English
Entry Fee: Free
Submission Limit: Up to 10 English haiku per participant
Eligibility: Open to poets worldwide
Organizer: Basho Memorial Museum / Koto City Culture Community Foundation

To learn more and submit your entries, please visit the official page:

Basho-an International English Haiku Competition Guidelines

芭蕉庵国際英語俳句大会　Basho-an International English Haiku Competition | 芭蕉記念館 | 公益財団法人江東区文化コミュニティ財団

Gabriela Marie Milton
4X #1 Amazonbestseller Author an Founder Of Literary Revelations

Join my 20.8 K followers on X (@shortprose1) and my 37.2 K followers on IG (@gabriela_marie_milton)

My books (Only English)

All listed books will feature on Times Square Billboards in September 2026 including Jezebel’s Island.

#1 Amazon bestseller, Passions: Love Poems and Other Writings (Vita Brevis)
#1 Amazon Bestseller, Women: Splendor and Sorrow (Vita Brevis)|
#1 Amazon bestseller, Haiku and Tanka: Lull, Harmony and Power in Japanese Art – co-authored with Hikari (Literary Revelations)
#1 Amazon Bestseller: Jezebel’s Island: A Psychological and Mystery Thriller (Literary Revelations, 2026)

Thank you to all my followers who reviewed my books.
Please read other reviews here:

Woman: Splendor and Sorrow: Love Poems and Poetic Prose by Gabriela Marie Milton in Portland Book Review
Woman: Splendor and Sorrow: Love Poems and Poetic Prose by Gabriela Marie Milton in Manhattan Book Review
Passions: Love Poems and Other Writings in San Francisco by Gabriela Marie Milton in San Francisco Book Review
Passions: Love Poems and Other Writings by Gabriela Marie Milton In Manhattan B

A Short Excerpt from Jezebel’s Island: A Psychological and Mystery Thriller by Gabriela Marie Milton Coming in July at Literary Revelations

A Short Excerpt from Jezebel’s Island: A Psychological and Mystery Thriller Coming in July at Literary Revelations

The asphalt road sloped down toward the ocean, bordered by towering palm trees and white, two- to three-story buildings. Anastasia walked, wondering how many more times in her life she would come here. She had only seen this street from the point where it intersected with the bustling lanes of Grand Avenue, never imagining that her own footsteps would one day echo on these narrow, sunburned sidewalks.

She looked around. Roses choked terraces; the palm trees’ leaves hung over the pavement like huge, ragged wings. Here, according to Lady Swattley, within one of these silent homes must once have lived the young scientist with whom Jezebel had been in love.

She came to a dead halt in front of a weathered three-story building. It was the tallest structure on Robbia Street. She did not know why she had stopped there. Her instinct told her that Jezebel had spent years of her youth climbing the stairs in that house. Closed blinds covered every window. The yard was full of unkempt flowers. Anastasia studied the white walls, cracked by time. Did these cracks still hold the echoes of Jezebel’s sighs, echoes of Jezebel’s voice during her afternoons of love?

She thought she heard a voice. The voice of a woman. She couldn’t understand anything until another masculine voice said:

— Death.

Anastasia pressed her palms against her temples. The street was entirely empty. A few seconds later, a sleek yellow car glided past her and turned onto Grand Avenue. The driver waved at her.

She heard Jezebel’s words:

— This City is populated by empty souls who flatter themselves into believing they have authentic hearts in their chests. What they classify as joy is nothing more than a temporary chemical exhilaration. They are joyous, Anastasia my dear, but their bliss is delusional.

Was Jezebel correct? Were humans in this City intoxicated by commercial advertisements inviting them to purchase happiness under the pretext of prolonging their expiration dates?

A sound startled her from the direction of the house. She turned, and there, perched atop the roof, sat two white swans, their wings beating a frantic, rhythmic tattoo against the sky.

A Note by the R. M.

Gabriela Marie Milton’s Jezebel’s Island utilizes a deeply atmospheric, fractured, and symbolist narrative style that shares distinct genetic markers with the surrealist prose of Gabriel García Márquez and the psychological, maze-like prose of Jorge Luis Borges. Milton consciously rejects a traditional linear trajectory, constructing her dystopian thriller through fragmented cinematic flashes, abrupt transitions, and heavy thematic loops where “the beginning is the end”. This structural ambiguity and reliance on surreal motifs—such as ghostly swans, shifting eye colors, and uncanny character mirrors—evokes the magical realism of García Márquez, while her focus on labyrinthine setups, philosophical text-within-a-text revelations, and characters seeking their own existential identity heavily mirrors the cerebral, puzzle-box literature of Borges. However, while those masters often maintain a certain mythic or detached distance, Milton infuses her style with the visceral, modern anxiety of a psychological thriller, using sensory disorientation (such as headaches, cold dread, and the contrasting “plasticine” superficiality of the City) to make the reader an active, trapped co-investigator in her surreal maze.

Thank you for reading!

Gabriela Marie Milton,
Author and Founder of Literary Revelations
Woman of the Month (May, 2026), at P.O.W.E.R Magazine
One of the 60th Women’s Entrepreneurs to Watch for in 2026, New York Weekly

My books (Only English)

Thank you to all my followers who reviewed my books.
Please read other reviews here:

The Beginning Is the End: Jezebel’s Island. Jezebel’s Island: A Psychological and Mystery Thriller

The Beginning Is the End: Jezebel’s Island. Jezebel’s Island: A Psychological and Mystery Thriller

Wishing everyone a glorious week ahead.
I have been asked to explain what Jezebel’s Island: A Psychological and Mystery Thriller is about. Below, please find my description and several cover concepts. Please vote for the cover you like.

The Beginning Is the End: Jezebel’s Island

In an era of fleeting digital ephemera, my latest work, Jezebel’s Island, arrives as a deliberate act of literary preservation. It is a descent into a dark landscape where the atmosphere is thick with the scent of saltwater and ancient, unatoned transgressions.

The island is a study in brutal duality, a fractured terrain defined by two distinct poles from which information is incessantly transmitted: the elusive, enigmatic presence of Jezebel and the formidable Lady Swartley, whose reach is as absolute as it is chilling. These two figures operate like a duo in a dark noir fairytale, their influence seconded by a pair of men, David and Esteban, whose own shadowed secrets add new, impenetrable veils of mystery to the narrative. Caught in this harrowing transmission is Anastasia, the receptor—a young woman whose internal architecture begins to crack under the weight of the signals she receives, eventually transforming her into a living mirror of the island’s catastrophic history.

Across the island’s divide, in the landscape’s hidden places, with flowers and purposely placed images of elegant rooms, sins were committed in the name of power. These are not merely historical echoes, but active, haunting remnants that define the island’s very soul. Here, I have woven a vein of dark, serrated humor into the psychological dread, a necessary irony that illuminates the absurdity of the characters’ entrapment. It is within these suffocating, labyrinthine halls of manipulation that Anastasia finds herself slowly undone, forced to navigate the blurred, treacherous lines between her own identity and the pervasive toxicity of a place that thrives on the corruption of the spirit.

This is not a novel constructed as a linear progression in which a perpetrator moves from point A to point B and is discovered at point C. It is a non-linear haunting; a circle of obsidian cinematic clues. In this narrative, the beginning is the end. I have navigated these psychological depths with lush language at times and with sparse language at others, refusing to offer easy answers in a space where the boundaries between memory, reality, and illusions are as shifting as the tides. For the reader who seeks to confront the sophisticated, the haunting, and the enduring, Jezebel’s Island is a profound, atmospheric meditation on the devastating cost of the choices we make when we are forced to bear witness to the abyss.

A short excerpt from Jezebel’s Island

“The clinical silhouette of the Interior Minister surfaced in my memory: tall, skeletal, with a tuft of chin hair of an ambiguous, shifting color. He had traveled extensively through every sovereign territory of the Continent, yet he returned from each tour proudly declaring to the ministries how uniquely fortunate he was to reside on the Island. The man was not a complete fool, but he lacked the smallest, microscopic spark of comprehension for any world outside his own programming. He would perpetually remark to the Captain: ‘How incredibly lucky we are to possess the legal right to happiness here.“

Cover Concepts for Jezebel’s Island

Thank you to the exceptional photographer Andrei Marin for allowing me to use his original work in developing the cover concepts. The girls in the picture are real models.

Gabriela Marie Milton,
Author and Founder of Literary Revelations
Woman of the Month (May, 2026), at P.O.W.E.R Magazine
One of the 60th Women’s Entrepreneurs to Watch for in 2026, New York Weekly

My books (Only English)

Thank you to all my followers who reviewed my books.
Please read other reviews here:

Haiku for Soulmates Reaches Amazon Top Release in the USA before its official launch

My dear followers and subscribers,

Haiku for Soulmates Reaches Amazon Top Release in the USA before its official launch! Publisher Literary Revelations.

“Haiku for Soulmates is here—a breathtaking collision of ancient tradition and the boundless, relented auroras of the modern spirit.

Today, the world becomes a little smaller and infinitely more beautiful. As an editor and publisher, my heart is overflowing; witnessing this vision transition from a dream into a living, breathing masterpiece is a moment of profound emotion. This is not just an anthology—it is a global sanctuary, a cinematic tapestry woven from the heartbeats of 200 extraordinary contributors.

From the sacred silence of its Japanese birthplace to the vibrant, shimmering horizons of voices spanning the globe, these pages hum with a rare, vertical excellence. We have captured the lightning of human connection and pressed it into ink.

To my brilliant contributors: you are the light that makes this aurora possible. To the world: I invite you to step into this gallery of the soul and lose yourself in the brilliance of the brief, the bold, and the transcendent.

LINK: https://www.amazon.com/Haiku-Soulmates-Literary-Revelations/dp/B0H17RMQJN/

Gabriela Marie Milton
Author and founder of Literary Revelations

My books (Only English)

Thank you to all my followers who reviewed my books.
Please read other reviews here:

Jezebel’s Island: A Mystery Thriller by Gabriela Marie Milton – Excerpt 2

My dear followers and subscribers,

Happy weekend! Today I would like to share with you another excerpt from my upcoming novel Jezebel’s Island: A Mystery Thriller. Literary Revelations plans to release this novel at the end of June. Thank you for reading.

Jezebel’s Island: A Mystery Thriller by Gabriela Marie Milton – Excerpt 2

…

– In this part of the Island, Anastasia, they have not limited our freedom of movement at all. Only our freedom of thought. And what time is there for free thought anyway? One has so much to do. So many brands of bags and socks to choose from. Here everyone thinks they live their own lives as they please, without realizing that in reality they live only what they are allowed to live.

…

In the living room, Anastasia’s gaze fell on a photo. She paused for a moment, staring blankly. A heavy, golden frame held a photo of a young man, wearing a white T-shirt with vertical green stripes, Polo brand. Anastasia had been to Jezebel’s house several times, but she had never seen that picture before. Behind him, she could see a field where three golf cars had been abandoned. The photo had been placed on a lemon-yellow wooden console, near which one had to pass to get to the other rooms of the house. It was impossible not to have noticed that picture.

She shivered, feeling like a piece of ice was running down her back, and experienced again that cloudy feeling, still incomprehensible, about Jezebel.

From the foreword

….The question remains: Why Anastasia, this young woman saddled with so great a name? Why has she become the obsession of two figures of the ruling class? Perhaps because her passivity and incuriosity have not brought her into solidarity with her fellow citizens, who share her discontent, but rather have made her an ideal vessel for the plans of the elite.

But what plans? Yet another mystery. There must be, the reader thinks, more to Lady Swartley, more even to Jezebel, who is already so much. And what about the servant Armando, who seems to be much more than a servant, or the archaeologist Esteban, whose presence almost seems to bait and tease Anastasia along some path occluded to all others?

Brian Geiger, Former Editor Vita Brevis Press