The Voices Israel Group of Poets

in English

The 2022 Reuben Rose Poetry Competition Awards Event

We held the awards event for the 33rd Reuben Rose Poetry Competition via Zoom: on April 30th 2023. As before, it immediately followed  the awards event for the  Bar Sagi Young Poets Prize.  And as before, people zoomed in not only from Israel but from overseas, including the UK, Ireland, the USA and Canada.  Some came late and some had to leave early, but altogether 52 people attended. We were happy to see that the winners of the preceding Bar Sagi Prize and some of the winners of Honorable Mentions, 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 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 Reuben Rose Winning Poems 2022 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 and the Bar Sagi prize-givings separately - and have uploaded the videos to the Voices Israel YouTube channel. A link has been sent to all our members and everyone else who registered to attend. Feel free to share it with whoever you like!


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

Iris Dan reading her 1st-prize poem:

David Silverman reading his 2nd-prize poem:

And a couple of screenshots from the Open Mic: