MoSt Poetry on Saturday featuring Christina Lux, Kim McMillon, & Salvatore Salerno

MoSt Poetry On Saturday Reading

August 17, 2024 at 2:00 p.m. PST

Carnegie Arts Center           250 N. Broadway Avenue, Turlock, CA

Join host Gary Thomas for the latest edition of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center’s (MoSt’s) Poetry On Saturday in-person readings on August 17 at 2:00 p.m. at the Carnegie Arts Center in Turlock. Come enjoy some high-quality summertime respite and restoration via three fine poets’ words!

Our featured readers are Christina Lux, Kim McMillon, and Salvatore Salerno.  An Open Mic time will follow the featured poets. For more details on the poets and their books, read their accompanying bios.

This event is free and open to the public, and light refreshments will be provided.

 

Christina Lux’s poetry has appeared on National Public Radio, in the Houston Chronicle, in textbooks by Oxford University Press, and in journals such as Women’s Studies Quarterly and North Dakota Quarterly.  Her book of poems, War Bonds, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press. Born in Pasadena, California, she lived in the Central Valley of California for several years before moving to Texas, then Québec, and finally spending five years in Cameroon, where she lived in the Bui Division of the Northwest Province as well as in Yaoundé before returning to the U.S. for university. She holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages from the University of Oregon and is currently Managing Director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of California,  Merced.

 

Dr. Kim McMillon is a producer, playwright, and contributor to the anthology Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka (Ohio University Press, 2021). McMillon is the editor of Willow Books’ anthology Black Fire—This Time, published March 15, 2022. McMillon produced the 2016 Dillard University-Harvard Hutchins Center Black Arts Movement  Conference in New Orleans. With UC Merced’s Center for the Humanities, ASUCM, and the Office of Student Life, Ms. McMillon co-produced the 2014 UC Merced Black Arts Movement Conference, Fifty Years On. McMillon edited the April 2018 special edition of The Journal of PAN African Studies on the Black Arts Movement and contributed a chapter on the Black Arts Movement to the Black Power Encyclopedia (1965-1975). This two-volume reference work explores the emergence and evolution of the Black Power Movement in the United States. McMillon produced, wrote, and starred in her one-woman show, Confessions of a Thespian: When Spirit & Theatre Collide, directed by Margo Hall and staged at the Julia Morgan Theatre in Berkeley, CA, in March 2000. McMillon also produced, wrote, and directed Voyages, which premiered at the Nova Theatre in San Francisco in March 1986 and was produced at Zellerbach Playhouse in August 1987. In January 1988, Berkeley’s Black Repertory Group produced Voyages.  Dr. McMillon’s children’s book, The Healing Book of Me, will be available in late 2024.

Salvatore Salerno has an M.F.A. from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He was a poet and playwright in the North Carolina Visiting Artist Program.  Salvatore is a retired English and drama teacher from Davis High School.  He was the Poet Laureate of Modesto from 2020-24 and is still the president of Stanislaus Audubon Society.  His sixth poetry book is After Thoughts.

MoSt Summer Poetry Workshop–Monsters, Villains, & a Disaster or Two: Writing About the Scary Stuff

Our July 20th MoSt Summer Poetry Workshop offers participants the opportunity to write about scary subject matter with facilitator Gillian Wegener. Please join us at the Modesto Library on Saturday, 7/20/24 at 1:00 p.m. for this free workshop open to all members of the public, from novice to experienced poet and everything in-between.

Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate Reception & Reading

Join us on Saturday, August 3, 2024 from 2-3 pm at the Carnegie Arts Center as we celebrate our incoming Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate.

Welcome our new laureate, Zoe Byron of Oakdale, and bid a fond farewell to our inaugural laureate,  Faith Delgado of Turlock.  With readings and refreshments.

At The Loft, 3rd floor of the Carnegie Arts Center,

The Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate program is a partnership between Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center, Stanislaus County Library, Stanislaus County Office of Education, MJC’s School of Language Arts and Education, and the Stanislaus Library Foundation.

 

 

 

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Monolin “Manny” Moreno and Lillian Vallee

Date: Tuesday, July 9, 2024
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: The Artist Lab at Prospect Theater Project, 1214 K Street, Modesto CA 95354

Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event. 

Hosted by Gillian Wegener

Monolin “Manny” Moreno 

image of Monolin "Manny" Moreno at a reading with dark background

Monolin “Manny” Moreno is of Yaqui-Tarascan descent and an Enrolled Member of the State Recognized Tribal Group of the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians. His five published works include poetry collections, memoirs, and a remembrance of Native elders Harry Jack and Barry Beaver Turner. 

His poems have appeared in Song of the San Joaquin, Hincha Poesia and Whispering Thunder.  He was a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2011 and was Poet of the Month for Moon Tide Press in 2012.

Moreno is a Sundancer and member of the Black Wolf Honor Society  Gourd Clan and Native American Church. Manny was brought out and introduced as a community elder at a pow-wow in Stockton CA, and he has served the Native community as a spiritual leader. 

Manny’s newest book, Santa Nella Blues, was just published earlier this year and was created with support and funding from The Heartland Creative Corps, California Arts Council, Merced United Way, and the Merced County Art Council.

Lillian ValleeImage of Lillian Vallee at a reading

Lillian Vallee is an award-winning translator, writer and scholar who served an apprenticeship with the Nobel-Prize winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Her poems appear in Collision I, II & III and More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets. She was one of the featured poets in Highway 99, A 

 

Literary Journey through California’s Great Central Valley and is the author of three chapbooks—Vision at Orestimba, Erratics, and handful of snow. 

Her popular monthly column in Stanislaus Connections, “Rivers of Birds, Forests of Tule: Central Valley Nature and Culture in Season,” was published in 2019  as a collection of the same name. Lillian is professor emeritus in English at MJC. 

Poetry Book Club–Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss

Please join us at 10:00 a.m. Saturday, July 27, 2024 at Bakeshop, 940 Eleventh Street in Modesto for MoSt Poetry Book Club. Linda Scheller will facilitate a discussion of Modern Poetry, the latest collection by Diane Seuss. Copies are available at the Modesto Library main desk. You’re always more than welcome to come and enjoy the discussion whether or not you’ve read the book! This event is free and open to the public.

“Diane Seuss’s signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft—ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda—and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor.” —https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/modern-poetry

Diane Seuss is the author of six books of poetry, including Modern Poetry; frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Prize; Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2021 she received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Michigan.