Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Tara Rico & Juan Luzuriaga

Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Inaugural Poet Laureate of Manteca Tara Rico and San Luis Obispo poet Juan Luzuriaga

Date: Tuesday, January 13, 2026
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, in the Roseburg Square shopping center

The reading is free; drinks, snacks, and books are available for purchase at Bookish. Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event. Hosted by Gillian Wegener

Tara Rico headshotTara Rico

Tara Rico (she/her/ella) is a local writer, advocate, performer, and educator. She is the City of Manteca’s first Poet Laureate; her work can be found in collections such as the Tuleberg Press anthology The Fire Within: Labor, Art, and the Human Spirit. 

Tara is also the founder of MAS Improv 209 and POETICAS Institute, a new nonprofit committed to bringing written, performing, and other creative art to the Central Valley and under-resourced communities. 

Tara is an actor and comedian who has performed recently at the Pam Kitto Black Box Theater of Stockton, Modesto’s Prospect Theater, and at the Central Valley Gender Health and Wellness Center’s “Kings, Queens, and Comedians” drag show of 2024. 

 

Juan LuzuriagaJuan Luzuriaga

Juan Luzuriaga was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and immigrated to the U.S. at 16 in 2000. He studied Neuroscience at Rutgers University and English at UC Merced. He teaches poetry in prisons, at Cuesta College, and California Poets in the Schools. He has been a featured panelist at UC Merced, Cuesta College Central Coast Writers’ Conference, Litfest and more, and he is a featured panelist at the 2026 San Francisco Writers Conference Poetry Summit.  

He has been published in Acentos Review, San Diego Poetry Annual, Monterey Poetry Review, Cholla Needles, Poetry Breakfast, Matchbox Magazine, and in the anthologies Silence Is Consent, To Be Completely Honest, and Method Writers Speak. His collection, Chimborazo Whispers, is forthcoming from Blue Light Press. 

 

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.