Poetry on Saturday Reading featuring Connie Post and Francesca Bell

MoSt’s Poetry On Saturday Reading
August 12, 2023  2:00 p.m. PST
Carnegie Arts Center (250 North Broadway Avenue, Turlock, California)
Join host Gary Thomas for the latest edition of MoSt’s Poetry On
Saturday readings in person on August 12 at 2:00 p.m. at the Carnegie
Arts Center in Turlock. Our featured readers are Livermore poet laureate
emeritus Connie Post and Marin County poet laureate Francesca Bell
(both with new books out!) followed by our Open Mic time after the
featured poets. This event is free and open to the public, and light
refreshments will be provided.
Connie Post served as first Poet Laureate of Livermore, California. Her
work has appeared in Calyx, Comstock Review, One, Cold Mountain
Review, Slipstream, Spillway, River Styx, Spoon River Poetry Review,
Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verse Daily. She has two full-length
books from Glass Lyre Press, entitled Floodwater and Prime Meridian.
Her most recent book, Between Twilight, is from New York Quarterly
books, and she has a recent chapbook, Broken Metronome, about her
brother’s journey with Parkinson’s.
Francesca Bell is the author of Bright Stain, a finalist for the Washington
State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award, and What Small Sound,, and is
the translator of Max Sessner’s Whoever Drowned Here, all from Red Hen
Press. Her work appears in B O D Y, ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books,
New England Review, North American Review, Mid-American Review, and
Rattle. She is the former poetry editor of River Styx, the translation editor
of Los Angeles Review, and the poet laureate of Marin County. She lives
with her family in Novato, California.
 

July Book Club: FELON by Reginald Dwayne Betts

Please join at the Modesto Library to discuss Felon: Poems by Reginald Dwayne Betts. Copies of the book are available at the check-out desk of the Modesto Library, courtesy of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center. Facilitated by Tina Marie Curiel-Vega.

Free Poetry Workshop–Playing with our ABC’s: Poetry Using the Alphabet as Structure

Most Summer Poetry Workshop, playing with our ABCs July 22, 2023, 1-3 pm Downtown Modesto Library
Please join us in the Modesto Library Auditorium for “Playing with our ABC’s: Poetry Using the Alphabet as Structure,” a poetry writing workshop facilitated by Gillian Wegener. This workshop will focus on using the alphabet as structure for new poems. We’ll try our hand at abecedarians, observational alphabet poems, and dictionary poems. Walk-ins welcome.

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Aideed Medina and Ramón García

Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Aideed Medina and Ramón García, hosted by Stella Beratlis

Date: Tuesday, July 11, 2023
Time: 7:00 pm PST on Zoom–RSVP required:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYld-CrrzIiE9f-nC5FZF4UnTu3ZCbULvXC. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Open mic: 3 mins per poet, follows the featured readers. Open mic sign-up. 

Aideed Medina

Aideed Medina is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, award winning spoken word artist and a playwright. She is a California Naturalist, and practices “flor y canto” as part of her poetic process and exploration of California’s natural history. Her work has appeared in Fresno State’s Club Austral Literary Magazine, Chicano Writers and Artists Association Journal, La Bloga, Poets Responding, Art of the Commune, Split This Rock, Nueva York Poetry Review, Di-Liio Revista Literaria, Artivista Anthology, as part of a collection of original art songs composed for The Opera Remix, Fresno Grand Opera, and co-writer of Eclectic Collective plays: Encounter Intuitive and Artista Invisible. Her debut collection, 31 Hummingbird, was just published earlier this year by Xingao Press. Aideed has a forthcoming full-length poetry collection, Segmented Bodies, from Prickly Pear Press coming later this year. In 2024, the Editorial Universitaria of the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in Mexico will be publishing her work poetry in a series that pairs Chicano-Mexican poets.

About 31 Hummingbird

Cover of 31 Hummingbird, new publication by Aideed Medina31 Hummingbird | A suite of poems is the debut collection by Chicana poet Aideed Medina. 31 Hummingbird chronicles a human relationship, and ascends with the flights of hummingbirds. The hummingbird is a unique being and a metaphor of the racing of hearts, whose beating never fluctuates whether in mid-flight, hovering, being rejected, ejected, accepted or dive-bombing for the nectars and sugared waters of the embraces.

Aideed Medina’s hummingbird poems are cross-pollinators: She brushes our tongues and eyes with the poetics of aerodynamic words.

Her debut collection of humming-poems is an invitation to risk flying on the wings of feathered lightning. Up, down, across, forward, backward, fluttering like thunder and lightning, 31 Hummingbird invites close and patient reading, waiting for the hummingbird to appear and disappear in the flash of a few lines.

Ramón García

Black and white portrait of Ramon Garcia sitting on white sofa, holding head with a cocked arm, elbow resting on knee. Ramón García is the author of two books of poetry The Chronicles (Red Hen Press, 2015) and Other Countries (What Books Press, 2010), and a monograph on the artist Ricardo Valverde (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).  The Chronicles was a finalist for the Latino International Book Award for Best Poetry Book in English in 2016.

García has published poetry, fiction and scholarly work in a variety of journals,  anthologies and museum catalogs.  His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry anthology, The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of US-Hispanic Literature, The American Journal of Poetry, Los Angeles Review, and Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas.  He has contributed to the art work and projects of various visual artists, including Berta Jottar, Harry Gamboa Jr., Susan Silton, David John Attyah, and Sandra de la Loza.

 Ramón García was born in Colima, Mexico and grew up in Modesto, California.  He has a B.A. in World Literature from University of California, Santa Cruz and a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego. He is a Professor at California State University, Northridge and lives in downtown Los Angeles.

About The Chronicles

Cover of The Chronicles by Ramon Garcia“Ramón García’s The Chronicles is wondrously deceptive. At first we may think we know the folkloric stuff dreams are made of, but soon one is inside a unique world where, through language and ritual, an edgy authority speaks through metaphor, chronicling the underbelly of the spoken and unspoken, and at times even the unspeakable. The Chronicles unearths things we didn’t know we knew—surprising, new, clear-eyed twists and turns. This collection of urgent poems, partly woven from stories inherited, sings through the past to the present and future.”—Yusef Komunyakaa

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Lynn Hansen, Richard Robbins, and Thomas Mitchell

Join the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center as we present poets Lynn Hansen, Richard Robbins, and Thomas Mitchell in a free on-line poetry reading hosted by Gillian Wegener.
ABOUT LYNN HANSEN
Lynn M. Hansen is a retired Modesto Junior College professor of marine biology. A member of the Ina Coolbrith Circle, Orinda, CA; MoSt Poetry Center, Modesto; and National League of American Pen Women, her work reflects her sense of place and the art of storytelling. In 2013 a collection of her poems was published by Quercus Review Press entitled Flicker: Poems. She is currently writing an historical novel about her maternal grandmother, Mernie Daisy Lewis, 1882-1963.
ABOUT RICHARD ROBBINS
Richard Robbins was raised in California and Montana, taught in Minnesota for many years, and recently moved back west to Oregon. Robbins has received awards or residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the Anderson Center, Willapa Bay AiR, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers. From 1986 to 2014, he directed the Good Thunder Reading Series at Minnesota State Mankato, which the Minnesota Humanities Commission called, “the premier small-town reading series in the country.”
“Part balm, part prayer, part revelation, the quietly moving and incantatory poems in Richard Robbins’s The Oratory of All Souls reveal a poetic voice that is masterful, adept, and profoundly compelling. These supple poems unfold seamlessly, with the muscular music of moving water: elegant, clear, fierce. Robbins has the gaze of a painter, with a gorgeous insistence on image, line, shadow, and light.” —Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of tsunami vs. the fukushima 50
ABOUT THOMAS MITCHELL
Thomas Mitchell is a shrewd and trusted observer of the natural world. In this third book, Where We Arrive, Mitchell listens to “the counsel of water” and moves “from one silence to another.” And as such, he spies “a red-tailed hawk drifting in absolute loneliness.” More often than not, Mitchell is a poet of intimate feelings. He remarks time and again upon various stars and moons, towhees and starlings. His poetry is a poetry bent on reimagining the world.
—Thomas Aslin, author of Salvage and A Moon Over Wings
You are invited to a Zoom meeting.
When: Jun 13, 2023 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUqcuqvrDkrHN0lTrVUQlB77MvaiI83W4zMAfter registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.