Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Modesto Poet Laureate Emeritus Salvatore Salerno with Sixteen Rivers Press poet Eliot Schain 

Date: Tuesday, March 10, 2026
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, in the Roseburg Square shopping center

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

ELIOT SCHAIN

Eliot Schain’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Santa Monica Review, and Miramar, among others, as well as in a number of anthologies, including Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed.  His book, The Distant Sound, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2020.  Earlier books include American Romance and Westering Angels, both from Zeitgeist Press. 

Selections from The Distant Sound have been recorded and released as a digital album in collaboration with guitarist Harrison Flynn, available on Apple Music and Spotify.  A newer collaboration Drive, They Said, also with Harrison Flynn, is available as well.  Schain has served as program director for The Poetry Society of America, taught high school, and currently works as a psychotherapist in Berkeley, California, where he lives with his wife, Mary D’Elia. 

ABOUT THE DISTANT SOUND

The Distant Sound is a prismatic meditation on what it means to be human, especially when the body and mind seek their own paths to heaven. The poems employ the long Whitmanian breath and are often narrative, but with mysterious syntax whose goal is to bypass reason and activate the heart.

SALVATORE SALERNO 

Salvatore Salerno has an M.F.A. from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he was awarded The Academy of American Poets University Prize. He has worked as a playwright and poet in the North Carolina Visiting Artist Program. After retiring from teaching English at Davis High School, Salvatore became a founding member of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center. He was the Poet Laureate of Modesto from 2020-24. His sixth book of poetry is After Thoughts.