Modesto Poetry Festival with Danusha Laméris & Gary Thomas

Danusha Laméris will lead a workshop on Knowing and Not-Knowing: Navigating Certainty and Uncertainty Through Poetic Gesture in the morning. Following a brief break, Gary Thomas will lead an afternoon workshop.

Writing is a way of knowing. It asks us to examine memory, certainty, and the possibility of revelation. We will explore how we can use the pivots of gesture to complicate our work, layer certainty with uncertainty, knowing with not-knowing. Let’s learn how to engage ourselves, and our readers, by unraveling what we’ve just said. You’ll see how this brings work to life, and can lead us to our own epiphanies. While I will be sharing sample work from poems, this can be applied to poetry and prose.

Danusha Laméris is the author of The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), which was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her poems have been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The SUN Magazine, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and winner of a 2021 Northern California Book Award. The 2020 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, she teaches poetry independently, and is a Poet Laureate emeritus of Santa Cruz County, California. She is currently on the faculty of Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program.

About: Laméris is an American poet born to a Dutch father and a Caribbean mother from the island of Barbados. She was raised in the California Bay Area, spending her early years in Mill Valley, then moving to Berkeley, where she attended The College Preparatory School. Since graduating with a degree in Studio Art from The University of California at Santa Cruz, she has lived in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains.

Gary Thomas: Shoulds and Shelters: Carving Out Corners of Presence

Amid the duties we think we “should” be performing for the benefit or opinions of others, how—to paraphrase James Crews— do we give ourselves permission to do nothing and allow for the space from which a sudden gratefulness can naturally arise? How do we carve out a space and time—and shelter—to practice?

Prior to retirement, Gary Thomas taught eighth grade language arts for thirty-one years and junior college English for seven, sharing and discussing at least one poem every day with students. He has had poems published in In the Grove, Time of Singing, and The Comstock Review, among others, and in the anthologies More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets and three of the Collision series. He is currently vice president of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center. He has a forthcoming book published by Finishing Line Press titled All the Connecting Lights.

Tickets $15; RSVP on Eventbrite (https://2022festival.eventbrite.com) for Zoom link.

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Kelly Cressio-Moeller & John Sibley Williams

The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present the Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Kelly Cressio-Moeller and John Sibley Williams, hosted by Stella Beratlis with an open mic following the featured poets. 

Tuesday, February 8, 2022

7 pm PST

RSVP for Zoom 

Sign up for open mic (3 mins per reader)

Kelly Cressio-Moeller

Kelly Cressio-Moeller is a poet and visual artist. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net, and have appeared widely in journals and at literary websites including Gargoyle, North American Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Water~Stone Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others. An associate editor at Glass Lyre Press, she lives in the Bay Area with her husband, two sons, and basset hound. Shade of Blue Trees from Two Sylvias Press (Finalist for the Wilder Prize) is her first poetry collection. Visit her website at www.kellycressiomoeller.com

John Sibley Williams

John Sibley Williams is the author of seven poetry collections. The most recent are the forthcoming Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (winner of the Cider Press Review Book Award, 2021) and The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award, 2021), just published this month. A twenty-six-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Laux/Millar Prize, Wabash Prize, Philip Booth Award and others. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry Northwest, among many others. John holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rivier University and an MA in Book Publishing from Portland State University. He is the founder and head teacher of Caesura Poetry Workshop, a virtual workshop series, and he serves as co-founder and editor of The Inflectionist Review. He also works as a poetry editor and book coach. John lives in Portland, Oregon.

 

MoSt Poetry Book Club

Dust Bowl Venus by Stella Beratlis (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2021)

Join our online discussion  of Dust Bowl Venus by Stella Beratlis on Wednesday, February 23, 2022 at 6:30pm PT. Prior reading is not required. Copies of the book are available to borrow at the circulation desk of the Modesto Stanislaus County Library.  To check on the books’ status, please call 209-558-7808.

Register in advance for the Zoom link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0vc-Gtqz0pHdQn9dapR_G_8EvWCeuvrtvg

“With tenderness, wit and humor, Dust Bowl Venus explores the fragility of love, good health an:d the earth. Rooted not just in the places of the City of Modesto but also in the music, legends, and community of the Central Valley, these poems brilliantly reflect a struggle to find beauty in the contradictions of our contemporary lives. Amazingly thoughtful and musical, these are poems we should all read.” —July Halebsky, author of Sky=Empty, Tree Line, and Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged)

“Stella Beratlis’s Dust Bowl Venus animates California’s Central Valley as a postmodern Prometheus, an eco-sapient Frankenstein with whom we wrangle, wrestle, and fall madly in love. Marked with sass and grit and grace, Beratlis’s imagistic associations jolt and jump cut in powers of ten. These poems stir us with the urgency of the Anthropocene, excite ‘a thicket of nerves,’ and form a ‘mycorrhizal web’ that connects us to the mantle of deep time.” —Rosa Lane, author of Chouteau’s Chalk and Tiller North

“The poems in Stella Beratlis’s Dust Bowl Venus ring with the clarity of a shovel strike against stone, each line cracking against the next, igniting spark after glorious spark. And yet, like the seasonal lake bed on which Modesto sits, like the many hands ‘making mud out of dry soil,; every poem aches toward tenderness. In one poem, Beratlis asks ‘What grows here?’ before revealing the bounty—heirloom tomatoes, holy basil, kindness—that can be coaxed from this ‘city of drought.’ But darker things grow here, too: a tumor ‘the consistency of a potato,’ fear, terror that ‘builds cell by sticky cell.’ Here, to grow, and to love, is to risk vulnerability. These ‘bone and ligament narratives’ of grief and yearning, illness and healing, perseverance and resistance, beat with so much heart in this fiercely beautiful book.” —Erin Rodoni, author of Body, in Good Light and A Landscape for Loss

Stella Beratlis grew up in a second-generation Greek-American family in Northern California. Her latest collection, Dust Bowl Venus, was published in May 2021. She is also the author of Alkali Sink (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2015). Her work has also appeared in numerous journals, including Harbor Review, Penumbra, Song of the San Joaquin, In-Posse Review, and California Quarterly, as well as in the anthologies The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010) and California Fire and Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology (Story Streets, 2020). She is coeditor of the collection More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets (Quercus Review Press, 2011) and served as the poet laureate of Modesto from 2016–2020. Beratlis lives in Modesto and is a librarian there.

You are invited to a Zoom meeting.
When: Feb 23, 2022 06:30 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0vc-Gtqz0pHdQn9dapR_G_8EvWCeuvrtvg

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Coffee, Tea, and Poetry

Coffee, Tea, and Poetry Sunday, January 30, 2022 4:00 P. M. (PST) hosted by MoSt Board member/Modesto Poet Laureate Sal Salerno.

It’s a very enjoyable chance to share a couple of poems from a new or favorite poetry book you’re reading now while learning about what other poetry folk are reading as you sip your favorite afternoon beverage!

Register in advance for this event:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0vd-2orT8tHdB4O3aPQT3jxtskobmOxdAG

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Dec 23

Barkin’ Dog Grill: We’ll Miss You

MoSt Poetry Center wishes to thank Hanibal Yadegar and the Barkin’ Dog Grill for the many years of support of poetry in our community, They gave a home to our monthly readings and supported our poetry center and our poets in a huge variety of ways. Thank you to The Barkin’ Dog Grill! You will be so missed!