After the great delay due to Covid-19 in holding last year’s awards event, this year we decided to hold the 2020 awards event in May of the following year as usual — via Zoom as we did last year, together with the awards event for the Bar Sagi Young Poets Prize.
Like last year, it was attended by many more of our members than can travel to a national event in Israel, including members from the UK, the USA and Canada, and friends of the winners of prizes and Honourable Mentions from Israel and abroad.
Fifty-seven people arrived for the start of the event, and most stayed right through to the end, including the Open Mic.
As usual, the competition’s administrator, Mark Levinson, gave us the facts and figures on this year’s entries, which were up from last year’s: a little over 300 poems were submitted. We were privileged to have with us all three judges, who all gave us useful comments: Kay Kim Richards of California, USA, our overseas judge, who noted the large number and high quality of the submissions; Miriam Webber of Israel, last year’s Reuben Rose second prize winner, who provided comments in verse on judging the competition; and David Silverman of Illinois, USA, one of last year’s Reuben Rose Honorable Mention winners, who noted how much he felt he gained from judging the competition.
The highlight of the evening was of course the reading of the three winning poems, and the ten that gained an Honourable Mention, by the poets themselves or in a few cases by proxy readers (even via Zoom, it’s too hard to attend from Australia when the event takes place at 4 am local time!). The texts of all the poems, and audio recordings of the first two winners reading their poems, are on the 2020 Reuben Rose Competition page.
We just had time at the end for a short Open Mic session, where eleven of our poets each read one of their poems.
We recorded the event via Zoom and the videos are on our Voices Israel YouTube channel. The video of this specific event may be viewed directly via this link.
Below are a few screenshots to give the feel of the evening.
A few participants: from left to right: 1st prize winner Ricky Friesem reading; Judge David Silverman; and Wendy Blumfield and Anne McCrady (USA) reading at the Open Mic.
Voices Israel Group of Poets in English 