Join us for the January Barkin’ Dog reading on Jan. 9 at 6:00 at the Barkin’ Dog Grill in downtown Modesto. We have two great featured readers and our most excellent open mic to look forward to.

Chiyuma Elliott is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly work and teaching focus on poetry and poetics, visual culture, and intellectual history from the 1920s to the present. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, Elliott was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and Assistant Professor of English, Creative Writing, and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. A Cave Canem Alumni Fellow, she has also received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. She earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Elliott’s first book of poems, California Winter League, was published by Unicorn Press in December of 2015. Her creative work has appeared in the African American Review, Callaloo, the Collagist, the Notre Dame Review, the PN Review, and other journals. She is the co-editor of several poetry chapbooks: African American Poetic Responses to Faulkner (2015 / U Press of Mississippi), Of Rivers ( 2016 / Southern Humanities Review), and an untitled ​group of poems inspired by the Gordon W. Bailey Collection (forthcoming). She is currently at work on a poem cycle called Vigil, and a scholarly monograph about poetics in the New Negro movement.

Stella Beratlis grew up in a Greek-American family in Northern California. Her work has appeared in Quercus Review, Penumbra, Song of the San Joaquin,In Posse Review, California Quarterly, and other journals, as well as in the anthology The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010). She is coeditor of the collection More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets(Quercus Review Press, 2011). Beratlis is a librarian in Modesto, where she lives with  her daughter.  Alkali Sink is her first collection of poems.