FINALIST: 2017 National Jewish Book Award
 
Tuvia Ruebner is not only one of Israel’s most celebrated poets, but one of the most important voices of our time. At 93, he has witnessed and suffered through the upheavals and catastrophes of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Born in Slovakia in 1924, Ruebner lost his family and homeland in the Holocaust; later, he lost his first wife and a son. His poetry is pervaded with a sense of both public and personal loss, but he also explores art, the nature of beauty, and the relationship of place and history. He immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1941, eventually moving to Kibbutz Merhavia, where he continues to live today.

Late Beauty collects poems from seven of his books from the past 45 years,
including numerous of his ekphrastic lyrics about both known and anonymous works of art, and his unique and diverse “postcard” poems.
 
Poet, translator, and editor Lisa Katz earned her PhD at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she has lived since 1983. Her chapbook Are You With Me (Finishing Line) is forthcoming in 2016. Reconstruction, a volume of her poetry in Hebrew translation, was published by Am Oved Press in Israel in 2008, the same year she was awarded the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize and a Ledig House International Writers Residency. Editor of the Israeli pages of Poetry International Rotterdam, Katz is translator of Hannan Hever's recently published study of a paradigm shift in Hebrew poetry in the 1940s, Suddenly the Sight of War, and the poetry volumes Approaching You in English (Admiel Kosman) and Look There (Agi Mishol). She will teach literary translation at Ben Gurion University in 2016-2017.
 
Shahar Bram is the author of several books of poetry in Hebrew, the latest of which (2016) is She'on Hatziporim [A Bird's Clock]. He co-authored Colorful Was Their Voice with artist Neta Goren, a book of poetry and portraits after twenty-five American poets. Bram is also the author of two fiction novels, Hazmanim Hametim [The Dead Times], and The Stones. Bram's scholarly works include The Ambassadors of Death: The Sister Arts, Western Canon, and the Silent Lines of a Hebrew Survivor (Sussex Academic Press, 2011); The Backward Look (The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2005, in Hebrew); Charles Olson and Alfred North Whitehead: an Essay on Poetry (Bucknell University Press, 2004). Shahar Bram teaches at the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa.