Second Tuesday Poetry with Linda Scheller and Lisa Rosenberg
Join us on October 13 as MoSt Poetry presents featured poets Linda Scheller and Lisa Rosenberg, both with new collections published by The Word Works press.
7:00 p.m. (6:30 doors) at Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, Modesto CA
Event free; books, beverages, and merch available for purchase.
LINDA SCHELLER
Linda Scheller is a San Joaquin Valley educator and author whose poetry, plays, and book reviews appear in Slipstream, Colorado Review, Terrain, Notre Dame Review, and Poetry East, among many other publications. She serves as vice president of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center, letters chair for National League of American Pen Women’s Modesto branch, and co-
producer of KCBP Community Radio’s Arts of the San Joaquin Valley and Women of the Valley.
Honors include Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations, Catherine Cushman Leach Poetry Awards, and California Federation of Chaparral Poets Prizes. Linda is the author of Fierce Light, published by FutureCycle Press in 2017; Wind & Children, published by Main Street Rag in 2022, and The Ghosts of 16 Larkin Street, selected by Ariel Francisco Henriquez Cos for The
Word Works 2026 Hilary Tham Capital Collection. Laurels, a collection of biographical poetry and prose honoring 38 historic women, is forthcoming from Prickly Pear Publishing.
About The Ghosts of 16 Larkin Street
“A wizard at revelatory domestic portraiture and telltale family incidents, Scheller reconstructs home and examines, with artfulness and agility, her German American heritage in an intrepid quest for compassion, clarity, and authentic identity.” Cyrus Cassels, 2021 Texas Poet Laureate, author of Lorca to the Umpteenth Power
“This powerful memoir-in-verse charts the generational haunting of this brave poet’s lineage. From a family tragedy to secrets, depression, and recovery, Scheller has done the difficult work of engaging her ghosts. This is an honest, sobering, revelatory book.” Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate, author of In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected Poems
“The Ghosts of 16 Larkin Street is filled with stark, realistic, personal yet quite universal poems that paint an intimate portrait of identity, interpersonal struggles, loss, family, and the ever-present need for empathy.” John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes Another
LISA ROSENBERG
Lisa Rosenberg is a poet, essayist, and engineer-physicist who worked in the US space program. Rooted in lifelong immersion in arts and sciences, her writing has been recognized by a Leonardo@Djerassi Residency, Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and MOSAIC America Fellowship. In 2017-2
018, she served as Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, California, and began offering public lectures, essays, and workshops that center systems and process skills essential to integrative thinking. Rosenberg is the author of the poetry collections Weeds and Stars (2026, The Word Works, Hilary Tham Capital Collection) and A Different Physics (2018, Red Mountain Press, winner of the American Legacy Book Award), as well as essays spanning memoir, satire, science, and travel. Her poems explore interrelatedness across disparate aspects of nature and culture, from the fantastic to the mundane, the subatomic to the celestial, often enacting scientific thinking in structure and mode, independent of theme. Her literary publications and features include The Marginalian, POETRY, The Common, The Threepenny Review, Plume, and many anthologies. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and part time in Ilia, Greece.
About Weeds and Stars
The rhythmically grounded, formally varied poems of Lisa Rosenberg’s Weeds
and Stars invite possibilities of kinship and transformation in the dichotomies that surround us, whether fantastic or ordinary, subatomic or celestial in scale: odes to Pi and snowflake formation; meditations on urchins and orbital mechanics, and an interwoven series of uncanny prose poems for resilient plants. This second collection finds lyric voice in the human and nonhuman alike, bringing into deeper bloom what Robert Pinsky hailed in Rosenberg’s debut: “an informed vision that is social as well as scientific, personal as well as historical.” Weeds and Stars engages with the tropes and expectations of Western lyric poetry, and the speaker that emerges is by turns wry, off-kilter, and playful, inviting us to reconsider agency and relation—feather to fire, plants to politics, Old Glory to accretion disks.
“…altogether ravishing…the finest reverie of reality since Diane Ackerman’s The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral, with the feeling-tone of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the sensibility of astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson’s A Responsibility to Awe.” —Maria Popova
“In an age of velocity and vanishing attention, Lisa Rosenberg’s poems offer a lucid countercurrent…remaking what we think we know of belonging, of wildness, of worth.” — Katherine Larson
“Let us praise the self-seeders, these sustainable poems, these marvelous metaphors.” — Indran Amirthanayagam