Poetry on Sunday Series

Come join us at the Carnegie Arts Center in Turlock for the third installment of our quarterly reading series! Click the image at right to download the PDF flyer, and see below for bios of our featured readers.

Sara Coito is a Central Valley native whose claim to fame is that she and Megan Rapinoe share an alma mater. She seeks to explore ugly emotions, the struggle and ease of intimacy, and the plurality of devotion in her poetry. Her other passions include music, making pictures, working in kindergarten classrooms, eggs for breakfast, and snail mail. You can find her earlier work in Sigma Tau Delta’s Rectangle and University of Portland’s Writers magazine. Connect with her via email at coitosk@gmail.com or Instagram @thecoits.

Ingrid Keriotis is a former MJC English instructor. Her first book of poetry, It Started with the Wild Horses, was published in April and is available at ingridkeriotis.com. Ingrid currently teaches at Sierra College in Grass Valley. When it comes to writing poetry, she believes in Richard Hugo’s advice: “You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.”

Joshua McKinney’s most recent book of poetry is Small Sillion (Parlor Press, 2019). His work has appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and many others. He is the recipient of The Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, The Dickinson Prize, The Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He is co-editor of the online eco-poetry zine, Clade Song. He teaches at California State University, Sacramento.

Second Tuesday @ Barkin’ Dog

Join us for the Second Tuesday Barkin’ Dog reading on July 9th at 6:00 at the Barkin’ Dog Grill in downtown Modesto. An open mic will follow the featured reading, so bring a poem or two to share.

Stay tuned for more info!

Potluck and Annual Meeting

Our annual meeting is coming right up and all members are invited. We’ll have the meeting at 3:00 and a potluck dinner at 4:00. Come here about next year’s plans and all the inner workings of MoSt, and of course, we’d love any member input as well. The get-together will be held at a member’s home in Modesto on Sunday, July 14. You are welcome to come just for the meeting or just for the potluck or for both, but we’d be so happy to have you join us.  Please email Gillian at info@mostpoetry.org if you’d like more information.

Second Tuesday @ Barkin’ Dog

Join us for the Second Tuesday Barkin’ Dog reading on June 11th at 6:00 at the Barkin’ Dog Grill in downtown Modesto. Our featured poets will be Stella Beratlis and Gillian Wegener. Wegener has been running the Barkin’ Dog series for the past 10 years and is now handing the reins over to Beratlis, who will carry on with new energy and all her grace and verve and humor. And there will be cake!

An open mic will follow the featured reading, so bring a poem or two to share.

Stella Beratlis is the author of Alkali Sink and the poet laureate of Modesto. Her work has been published in California Quarterly, In Posse Review, hardpan, Song of the San Joaquin, Penumbra, and Quercus Review as well as the anthology The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed. She is a librarian at Modesto Junior College.

Gillian Wegener is the author of two collections of poetry, both from Sixteen Rivers Press, The Opposite of Clairvoyance (2008) and This Sweet Haphazard (2017). Her work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and is forthcoming from MockingHeart Review. Wegener is a co-founder of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center, has served as poet laureate for the City of Modesto, and started this reading series in June of 2009.

Poetry Book Club

MoSt is pleased to announce another installment of our Poetry Book Club! Join us for a conversation about Theodore Roethke’s final collection The Far Field. Four copies of The Far Field are available at the downtown Modesto library to check out, but if you have Roethke’s Collected Poems, almost the entire collection is included there as well.

The book club will be held Wednesday, July 24 at 6:30 in the conference room at the downtown library and will be facilitated by Salvatore Salerno.  See you there!