Mini Workshop for Teen Poets: How to Write a Tiny Poem

Woven Words Tiny Poem Contest: Teen Voices from the Central Valley, presented by MoSt Poetry’s Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate program, is now open for submissions from Stanislaus County high school students grades 9-12.

Poets are invited to submit 1-3 very short poems (3-5 lines). The contest is free and open to anyone living in or attending high schools in Stanislaus County.

The author of the winning poem in each of the five categories wins $50. Poets are also invited to submit poems to the anthology without connecting them to the contest themes. The contest deadline is January 31, 2026. Stanislaus County YPL Valentina Zeff will weave the short submissions together to create one book-length poem, to be published as an anthology and distributed to participants.

Zeff will be conducting a mini-workshop on writing a tiny poem and will discuss the contest on Saturday, December 13,  202, at 1:00 pm on Zoom: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81498958531

The Stanislaus Youth Poet Laureate program is presented by MoSt Poetry in partnership with SCOE, Stanislaus County Library, MJC’s School of Language Arts & Education and the Library & Learning Center, and the Stanislaus Library Foundation.

Second Tuesday – MoSt Member Potluck/Open Mic

Join us for our December reading at The Dragonfly- Art for Life for a joyful open mic and potluck for members of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center.

We’d love to have you there! It’s not too late to join MoSt–you can join at the door, even.

MoSt Poetry on Saturday featuring Lucille Lang Day and Carl Landauer

Please join host Gary Thomas at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, November 22, 2025 at Carnegie Arts Center (250 North Broadway Ave., Turlock, California) for a poetry reading featuring Lucille Lang Day and Carl Landauer. There will be light refreshments and an open mic time following the featured poets. This event is free and open to the public.

Lucille Lang Day is the author of four poetry chapbooks and seven full-length collections, most recently Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place. She has also edited three poetry anthologies and published two children’s books and a memoir. Her work appears in more than 200 magazines and anthologies, such as The Cincinnati Review, The Hudson Review, River Styx, The Threepenny Review, Scientific American, ZYZZYVA, and Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology. Her many honors include the Blue Light Poetry Prize, two PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Literary Awards, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and eleven Pushcart Prize nominations. She is founder and publisher of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books. https://lucillelangday.com

 

Carl Landauer taught history at Yale, Stanford, and McGill and is currently a contributing editor for Poetry Flash and a visiting scholar with UC Berkeley’s Institute for South Asia Studies. His poetry has appeared in Kenyon Review, Exacting Clam, and Poetry Flash. His writing on poetry and cultural history has appeared in Beat Scene, The American Scholar, Salmagundi, Confrontation, Renaissance Quarterly, German Studies Review, and Poetry Flash—as well as a critical analysis of Project 2025 published by Public Seminar. He is currently writing a long series of poems he calls “refracted ekphrases,” each of which focuses on a movie that is adapted from literature.

 

Second Tuesday Reading featuring Marisol Baca & Gillian Wegener at Bookish

Please join us at Bookish Modesto as we feature two tremendous Central Valley poets: Gillian Wegener and Marisol Baca.

Marisol Baca teaches English, Literature, and Creative Writing at Fresno City College. She teaches Honors in the Leon S. Peters Honors Program, and she also teaches as a part of the RAIN program (Resources for American Indian Needs). Baca is the author of a book of poems called Tremor, and she was named Fresno’s first woman and first Chicana/Latinx Poet Laureate (2019-2021). Marisol’s poem about the naming of Fresno has been designated the city’s official poem.

Gillian Wegener is the author of one chapbook and two full-length collections of poetry: Lifting One Foot, Lifting the Other (In the Grove Press, 2001), The Opposite of Clairvoyance (2008), and This Sweet Haphazard (2017), both from Sixteen Rivers Press. She is also the founding president of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center, a previous Poet Laureate for the City of Modesto (2012-2016), and a two-time recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. She is a long-time educator in Oakdale and has lived in Modesto longer than she’s lived anywhere else.

The reading starts at 7:00 at Bookish Modesto. With open mic following featured poets.

 

Author Bio Workshop & Youth Poet Laureate Q & A

Mini Author Biography Workshop & Youth Poet Laureate Q & A

Valentina Zeff, current Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate, answers your questions! 

Join us on Saturday, October 25, 2025, at 1:00 p.m. as Youth Poet Laureate Valentina Zeff shares tips on how to write an author bio.  This is great to have when you’re submitting poems to anthologies and poetry journals, entering poetry contests, and when you’ve been asked to feature at a poetry reading.

Feel free to drop in and meet Valentina and learn about the Woven Words: Teen Voices from the Central Valley Anthology and how you can submit poems for that.

Zoom Meeting Link