UPDATED: Poetry at the Carnegie featuring Jesse Wolfe and Stella Beratlis

PLEASE NOTE: Due to a necessary scheduling change, Jesse Wolfe will read with Stella Beratlis on 2/21/26. Cleo Griffith will be a featured reader at a future date to be determined. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Please join host Gary Thomas at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, February 21, 2026 at Carnegie Arts Center (250 North Broadway Ave., Turlock, California) for a poetry reading featuring Jesse Wolfe and Stella Beratlis. There will be light refreshments and an open mic time following the featured poets. This event is free and open to the public.

Jesse Wolfe is a poet, scholar, and English Professor at CSU Stanislaus, where he has taught since 2006. His debut poetry chapbook, En Route, was published in 2020 by Cathexis Northwest Press, who will also publish his new volume, Breathe Again: A Polyphony, in 2026. He is the author of two scholarly books about modernist literature and the history of intimacy. He is currently working on a third scholarly book about African American modernism and ideas of progress.

Stella Beratlis is the author of Dust Bowl Venus. Her first collection Alkali Sink was a nominee for the 2016 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Harbor Review, California Quarterly, and In Posse Review. among others, and in the anthologies The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed and California Fire and Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology. She was Modesto’s poet laureate from 2016-2020 and works as a librarian at Modesto Junior College.