The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and host Stella Beratlis are pleased to welcome Iris Jamahl Dunkle and Cathryn Shea for Second Tuesday Poetry on Tuesday, March 9, 2021. Join the reading via Zoom at 7 pm: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/96055243749

Open Mic signup: https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday

Iris Jamahl Dunkle writes and lives in Northern California.  An award-winning literary biographer, essayist, and poet, her academic and creative work challenges the western myth of progress by examining the devastating impact that agriculture and overpopulation have had, and continue to have, on the North American West. Taking an ecofeminist bent, her writing also challenges the American West’s androcentric recorded history by researching the lives of women. As Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, she witnessed first-hand the devastating 2017 wildfires. These fires were the catalyst for her latest collection of poetry West : Fire : Archive and her investigation of her family’s migration to California during the Dust Bowl. Twitter: @irjohnso

Cathryn Shea’s poetry has been published in New Orleans Review, Typishly, After the Pause, burntdistrict, Permafrost, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere; she has also been shortlisted or selected for a variety of poetry prizes, including winning the Marjorie J. WIlson Award, judged by Charles Simic. She’s the author of four chapbooks and her first full-length collection, Genealogy Lesson for the Laity, was just published in September 2020 by Unsolicited Press of Portland, Oregon. Poet Thomas Centolella author of Almost Human (Tupelo Press, winner of the Dorset Prize),Terra Firma, Lights & Mysteries, and Views from along the Middle Way  (Copper Canyon), notes the following about Cathryn’s work: “Focused chiefly on the domestic life, with all its “important confusion,” but also ranging into the transpersonal, Shea holds a particular regard for subjects that have vanished or are on the verge of vanishing, and does her best to rescue them with her appealingly quirky style, sometimes comic, sometimes melancholy, and always vested with affection.”  Follow Cathryn on Twitter: @cathy_shea.