The awards event for the 32nd (2021) Reuben Rose Poetry Competition was held, as before, via Zoom. It took place on April 26th 2022, together with the awards event for the 3rd Bar Sagi Young Poets Prize. Covid-19 was declining and we could have held the event in-person, but decided on Zoom because all three prize-winners and half the winners of Honourable Mentions live outside of Israel.
Holding the joint event by Zoom also enabled many more people to take part, including our overseas members: around 45 people registered for the event and 40 managed to attend it, not only from Israel but also from the UK, the USA and Canada. We were happy to see that the winners of the preceding Bar Sagi Prize all stayed on for the Reuben Rose event.
As usual, the competition’s administrator, Mark Levinson, gave us the facts and figures on this year’s entries. We were privileged to have with us two of the three judges, who both offered useful comments: Prof David Caplan, our overseas judge, from the USA, who commented that he was impressed not only by the quality of the poems but also by the range of their interests and styles; and Ricky Rapoport Friesem, last year’s First Prize winner.
Mark Levinson then conducted the highlight of the evening: the reading of the three winning poems, and the ten that gained an Honourable Mention, mostly read by the poets themselves but in a few cases by proxy readers.
We had time at the end for a short Open Mic session, where eight of our members, including some from the USA, each read one of their poems.
The texts of all the poems, and audio recordings of the first two winners reading their poems, are on the 2021 Reuben Rose Competition page.
We recorded the event via Zoom – the Reuben Rose and the Bar Sagi prize-givings separately – and the videos are on our Voices Israel YouTube channel. You can also directly view the specific video of this Reuben Rose awards event here.
Below are a few screenshots, to give the feel of the evening.
Yiskah Rosenfeld (top) reading her winning poem
Amy Small-McKinney’s 2nd-prize-winning poem
Voices Israel Group of Poets in English 