2022 Reuben Rose Awards Event

As usual, the competition’s administrator, Mark Levinson, gave us the facts and figures on this year’s entries. We had hoped to have with us our overseas judge, the poet Yehoshua November, but a last-minute faculty meeting prevented his attendance. He did however send us his comments on the winning poems so that we had the benefit of his expertise.  Many thanks to Yiskah Rosenfeld, one of the other two judges, also from the U.S. (the winner of the previous year’s 1st prize) who made a great effort to attend and managed to be with us for long enough to give us her comments also.

Mark Levinson then conducted the highlight of the evening: the reading of the three winning poems, and the ten that gained an Honourable Mention, by the poets themselves; only one Honourable Mention winner could not attend and sent us an audio file of himself reading his poem instead.  The texts of all the poems, and audio recordings of the three winners reading their poems, are on the 2022 Reuben Rose Competition page, accessible also from the list of winning poems year by year on the Winners and Poem Texts page.

We had time at the end for a short Open Mic session, where several of our members, including some from the USA, each read one of their poems.

We recorded the event via Zoom – the Reuben Rose, the Bar Sagi prize-givings and the Open Mic separately – and have uploaded the videos to the Voices Israel YouTube channel. We sent the links to all our members and everyone else who registered to attend. Feel free to share them with whoever you like!

Below are a few screenshots, to give the feel of the evening.