Our July 20th MoSt Summer Poetry Workshop offers participants the opportunity to write about scary subject matter with facilitator Gillian Wegener. Please join us at the Modesto Library on Saturday, 7/20/24 at 1:00 p.m. for this free workshop open to all members of the public, from novice to experienced poet and everything in-between.
Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate Reception & Reading
Join us on Saturday, August 3, 2024 from 2-3 pm at the Carnegie Arts Center as we celebrate our incoming Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate.
Welcome our new laureate, Zoe Byron of Oakdale, and bid a fond farewell to our inaugural laureate, Faith Delgado of Turlock. With readings and refreshments.
At The Loft, 3rd floor of the Carnegie Arts Center,
The Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate program is a partnership between Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center, Stanislaus County Library, Stanislaus County Office of Education, MJC’s School of Language Arts and Education, and the Stanislaus Library Foundation.
Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Monolin “Manny” Moreno and Lillian Vallee
Date: Tuesday, July 9, 2024
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: The Artist Lab at Prospect Theater Project, 1214 K Street, Modesto CA 95354
Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event.
Hosted by Gillian Wegener
Monolin “Manny” Moreno
Monolin “Manny” Moreno is of Yaqui-Tarascan descent and an Enrolled Member of the State Recognized Tribal Group of the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians. His five published works include poetry collections, memoirs, and a remembrance of Native elders Harry Jack and Barry Beaver Turner.
His poems have appeared in Song of the San Joaquin, Hincha Poesia and Whispering Thunder. He was a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2011 and was Poet of the Month for Moon Tide Press in 2012.
Moreno is a Sundancer and member of the Black Wolf Honor Society Gourd Clan and Native American Church. Manny was brought out and introduced as a community elder at a pow-wow in Stockton CA, and he has served the Native community as a spiritual leader.
Manny’s newest book, Santa Nella Blues, was just published earlier this year and was created with support and funding from The Heartland Creative Corps, California Arts Council, Merced United Way, and the Merced County Art Council.
Lillian Vallee
Lillian Vallee is an award-winning translator, writer and scholar who served an apprenticeship with the Nobel-Prize winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Her poems appear in Collision I, II & III and More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets. She was one of the featured poets in Highway 99, A
Literary Journey through California’s Great Central Valley and is the author of three chapbooks—Vision at Orestimba, Erratics, and handful of snow.
Her popular monthly column in Stanislaus Connections, “Rivers of Birds, Forests of Tule: Central Valley Nature and Culture in Season,” was published in 2019 as a collection of the same name. Lillian is professor emeritus in English at MJC.
Poetry Book Club–Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss
Please join us at 10:00 a.m. Saturday, July 27, 2024 at Bakeshop, 940 Eleventh Street in Modesto for MoSt Poetry Book Club. Linda Scheller will facilitate a discussion of Modern Poetry, the latest collection by Diane Seuss. Copies are available at the Modesto Library main desk. You’re always more than welcome to come and enjoy the discussion whether or not you’ve read the book! This event is free and open to the public.
“Diane Seuss’s signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft—ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda—and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor.” —https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/modern-poetry
Diane Seuss is the author of six books of poetry, including Modern Poetry; frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Prize; Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2021 she received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Michigan.
Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Rooja Mohassessy & Tamer Said Mostafa
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is proud to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Rooja Mohassessy, author of When Your Sky Runs Into Mine, and Tamer Mostafa, author of Where Will I Find America? Hosted by Gillian Wegener.
Date: Tuesday, June 11, 2024
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: The Artist Lab at Prospect Theater Project, 1214 K Street, Modesto CA 95354
Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event.
ROOJA MOHASSESSY
Rooja Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet and educator. She is a MacDowell Fellow and an MFA graduate of Pacific University, Oregon. Her ekphrastic debut collection When Your Sky Runs Into Mine (Feb 2023) was the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Poetry Award. Rooja has been featured on NPR, The Hive Poetry Collective, and other poetry podcasts and radio stations. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poet Lore, RHINO Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, CALYX Journal, Ninth Letter, Cream City Review, The Adroit Journal, New Letters, The Rumpus, The Journal, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Her work is also anthologized in California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, and Colossus: Body, a compilation of writings by Californians writing on the themes of bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. Rooja is an editorial assistant at the journal Prairie Schooner.
About WHEN YOUR SKY RUNS INTO MINE
“Rooja Mohassessy’s debut collection, WHEN YOUR SKY RUNS INTO MINE, belies any notion of a first book. It is a work of expansive vision and formal achievement, sounding an assured and unforgettable voice in poetry. Ekphrasis is at the core of Mohassessy’s poetics, resplendent in her responses to works of visual art and in the richly textured images she creates with intricate diction and syntax.”
-Shara McCallum
TAMER SAID MOSTAFA
Tamer Said Mostafa is an Arab-American, Muslim poet and storyteller from Stockton, California. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines such as Zone 3, Confrontation, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Freezeray among others. Tamer is a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, and a graduate of the creative writing program at University of California, Davis where he won the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Contest for Poetry. His debut, full length book of poetry, Where Will I Find America? was released in Summer 2021. Tamer lives life through spirituality, community work, and the music of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony.
About WHERE WILL I FIND AMERICA?
“In the debut collection Where Will I Find America?, Tamer Said Mostafa renders narratives of childhood to adulthood demanding an interrogation of what it means to be a person of other. From body image to intimacy, these poems beautifully weave inextricable culture and place. Islamic traditions provide the framework for extraordinary love of family as well as witnessing of self as each poem shelters the narrative bravely. We too want to see the past with eloquent bravery, knowing that its truth is not the same as what we imagine. This collection’s lyrical and visual evocations do no harm in the telling about the harmed. Empathy and love counter the brutality of social order and familial dislocation. As Mostafa brings mind and body into these compassionate poems, he reveals a hopeful awakening.”
-Rhony Bhopla