We are so excited to feature Rooja Mohassessy and Farnaz Fatemi for our Second Tuesday reading in March.

Please RSVP to get Zoom link for reading:  https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYucOmqrzIrGdb0wNX9dF4OQqZv7IRjNEOT

Hosted by Modesto poet laureate emeritus Stella Beratlis; open mic follows featured poets. (Open mic sign-up.)

Rooja Mohassessy

Rooja Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet and educator living in Northern California. She is a MacDowell fellow and a graduate of the Pacific University MFA program. Her first poetry collection, When Your Sky Runs Into Mine, was the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Poetry Prize and was published by Elixir Press earlier this year. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poet Lore, RHINO Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, CALYX Journal, Ninth Letter, Cream City Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Bare Life Review, Potomac Review, The Florida Review, New Letters, International Literary Quarterly, and elsewhere.

ABOUT WHEN YOUR SKY RUNS INTO MINE

“When Your Sky Runs Into Mine is a stunning debut collection … about personal revolution, the turning toward art in times of suffering, the claiming of a rich cultural heritage.”—Ellen Bass, author of Indigo

“Rooja Mohassessy’s debut collection 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. “ —Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone

Mohassessy’s intellectual power and penchant for image stand out in beautiful ways in this debut collection. She displays a painterly use of color, texture, and image that reflects her striking awareness of the physical world.  Her capacity for efficient and elegant syntax and her fierce intelligence when dealing with political subjects and subjects of the female body in this world, constitute a most welcome addition to American poetry.  This is a very impressive debut collection by a most promising poet.” —Kwame Dawes, author of UnHistory with John Kinsella

Farnaz Fatemi

Farnaz Fatemi, an Iranian American poet and writer, and Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate for 2023 & 2024, is a founding member of The Hive Poetry Collective. She was formerly a writing instructor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her book, Sister Tongue زبان خواهر, was published in September 2022. It won the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, selected by Tracy K. Smith, and received a Starred Review from Publisher’s Weekly.  Some of her poems and lyric essays appear in Poem-a-Day (Poets.org), Tab Journal, Pedestal Review, Nowruz Journal, Grist Journal and Tupelo Quarterly.

ABOUT SISTER TONGUE

“Delicious, provocative, and incredibly wise, Farnaz Fatemi transcends years and oceans in these pages. Like gripping a cup and string to the ear, Sister Tongue is a hopeful missive, proof of words and their witnesses, an atlas of the wonder of becoming.”—T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“Poet Farnaz Fatemi is the soulful Iranian American truth-teller and wonder-wanderer we’ve needed to hear. In Farsi, in English, in Tehran, or California, these poems cherish the miracle of connectedness by weaving family threads through time and space—through sisters, mothers, grandmothers, through a changed and changing world. Sister Tongue is a luscious love letter to language(s), spoken in a trusting, intimate voice. The poet recognizes the twinned solace of silence and song, of sister and self. Loss takes its seat, as it does, at the table, and Fatemi, with tea, family history, powerful memory, and a new/old tongue, inscribes it alongside the depths of beauty and joy in this radiant book of passionate understanding.”—Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum

“I praise the present tense of these poems for its tensile strength, its ability to hold the struggle that is happening in the past, present, and future. The way it speaks of the perpetual, of what it is to be tongue-tied in the presence of one’s other self. ‘Language is geological,’ this speaker tells us, ‘a process of accumulation, and accretion accompanied by landslides.’ In setting out to speak the language of her blood, she finds herself at once estranged and embraced. Thrilled and defeated. What to do with such a natural disaster? These poems persist in their attempts to bridge worlds, offering hope of a complex and hard-won reconciliation, one richly crafted line at a time. In the words of Fatemi, ‘I want the foreigner in me / to meet the foreigner in me.’”—Danusha Laméris, author of Bonfire Opera“

Sister Tongue, Farnaz Fatemi’s debut poetry collection, transports us to a place where language must stretch to fit the largeness of human love and longing, and in doing so, fills the absences we did not even know we harbored. Sister Tongue begins to say what many of us already know—that borders and countries are too limiting to define us. Her poems offer us both a reckoning and a salve.”—Persis M. Karim, chair of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University