5th NATURE POETRY READING & WALK
DOS RIOS STATE PARK
3599 Shiloh Road, Modesto
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2026
9:00-11:00 a.m. Free
You are welcome to bring your favorite poems on nature, or your own nature poems, to read to the group. The reading will be at the ramadas from 9:00-10:00 a.m. followed by an optional one-hour hike around the oxbow pond. The event will be hosted by Salvatore Salerno, a volunteer at Dos Rios and Poet Laureate Emeritus of Modesto, 2020-24.
Sep 02
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 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.
“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 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 2017-2018, 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.
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
Aug 16
Come to the Table! Join us in person for the 14th Annual MoSt Poetry Festival, a bilingual poetry conference featuring poet Juan Luzuriaga
Registration and continental breakfast 9:30-10:00 a.m.
Workshop 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Light lunch served
Tickets $40; Eventbrite fee applies (purchase tickets)
Get ready for an amazing morning and afternoon at the 14th Annual MoSt Poetry Festival, for a bilingual conference where Spanish and English will be celebrated in poetry.
Guest poet/facilitator: Juan Luzuriaga
Join us in person to experience the powerful words and unique style of Juan Luzuriaga.
Juan Luzuriaga was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and immigrated to the U.S. at 16 in 2000. He studied Neuroscience at Rutgers University and English at UC Merced. He teaches poetry in prisons, at Cuesta College, and California Poets in the Schools. He has been a featured panelist at UC Merced, Cuesta College Central Coast Writers’ Conference, Litfest and more, and he is a featured panelist at the 2026 San Francisco Writers Conference Poetry Summit.
He has been published in Acentos Review, San Diego Poetry Annual, Monterey Poetry Review, Cholla Needles, Poetry Breakfast, Matchbox Magazine, and in the anthologies Silence Is Consent, To Be Completely Honest, and Method Writers Speak. His book Cotopax Whispers, a poetry collection exploring migration, memory, identity, language, and ancestry–was just published by Blue Light Press.
Whether you’re a poetry lover or just curious, this generative workshop will inspire you to write poems and celebrate language.
Don’t miss out on this chance to connect with the local poetry scene and enjoy being in community with other writers. Purchase tickets now!
Aug 16
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Bay Area poets Judy Halebsky and Nichole Turnbloom
Date: Tuesday, September 8, 2026
Time: 7:00 pm; doors at 6:30 PM
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, in the Roseburg Square shopping center.
Event is free. Refreshments, books, and cool bookstore merch available for purchase!
Join host Gary Thomas for the latest edition of MoSt’s Poetry at the Carnegie readings on August 15 at 2:00 p.m. at the Carnegie Arts Center, 250 North Broadway Avenue in Turlock, CA. Our featured poets are Sixteen Rivers Press poets Carolyn Miller and Lenore Myers (both with new books out!) followed by our Open Mic time. This event is free and open to the public, and light refreshments will be provided.
Carolyn Miller lives in San Francisco, where she writes, paints, and works as a freelance book editor. Her books of poetry are After Cocteau and Light, Moving, both from Sixteen Rivers Press; Route 66 and Its Sorrows from Terrapin Books; and four limited-edition letterpress chapbooks from Protean Press. Her poems have been featured on Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Almanac and have appeared in Smartish Pace, SALT, ONE ART, The Southern Review, and The Gettysburg Review, among other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems: American Places. Her honors include the James Boatwright III Award for Poetry from Shenandoah and the Rainmaker Award from Zone 3.
About Random Universe: “Carolyn Miller’s new poetry collection is a remarkably inclusive work, with a playfulness in form and structure that feels wonderfully inventive. In these pages, she takes on ekphrastic responses to Cy Twombly’s art, “mistranslations” of Milosz and Tranströmer, and her own translation of an ancient Egyptian text. She creates list-poems of “Lost Language” and “New Lines for Fortune Cookies” and writes about the lives of objects. And through it all, she shows her remarkable talent for writing about sensuous joy, joy that is earned, though haunted by history and the poet’s place in it. I am glad to sit at the banquet table of her Random Universe and feast.” —Julia B. Levine, author of Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction
LENORE MYERS was born to artist parents who tried to live as semi-bohemians in the suburbs. When that fell apart, the author spent her childhood and youth moving between different towns in Northern California. After spending more years moving around the United States and abroad, she returned to the greater Bay Area to be near family while raising her son. Her chapbook, Regards to Balthus, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2023. Her poems and essays appear in a variety of literary journals.
About Afterimages: “Conventional forms of ekphrasis are often little more than poetic descriptions of art. But there is nothing conventional about Lenore Myers’s Afterimages. The poems in this fabulous collection go beyond description, beyond the page, beyond the canvas, beyond looking and seeing, beyond interpretation and reflection, beyond decoding. They participate in what we might call an expanded ekphrasis that takes the dialogue between art and poetry to new levels of interactivity. This is a book that asks big questions about how we perceive and process the acts of making art and engaging with its aftereffects. Art lasts. It lingers. In our heads and in our hearts.” —Dean Rader, author of Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly
