Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog - on Zoom!
2021-03-09 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom
The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and host Stella Beratlis are pleased to welcome Iris Jamahl Dunkle and Cathryn Shea for Second Tuesday Poetry on Tuesday, March 9, 2021. Join the reading via Zoom at 7 pm: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/96055243749
Open Mic signup: https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday

Iris Jamahl Dunkle writes and lives in Northern California. An award-winning literary biographer, essayist, and poet, her academic and creative work challenges the western myth of progress by examining the devastating impact that agriculture and overpopulation have had, and continue to have, on the North American West. Taking an ecofeminist bent, her writing also challenges the American West’s androcentric recorded history by researching the lives of women. As Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, she witnessed first-hand the devastating 2017 wildfires. These fires were the catalyst for her latest collection of poetry West : Fire : Archive and her investigation of her family’s migration to California during the Dust Bowl. Twitter: @irjohnso
Cathryn Shea’s poetry has been published in New Orleans Review, Typishly, After the Pause, burntdistrict, Permafrost, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere; she has also been shortlisted or selected for a variety of poetry prizes, including winning the Marjorie J. WIlson Award, judged by Charles Simic. She’s the author of four chapbooks and her first full-length collection, Genealogy Lesson for the Laity, was just published in September 2020 by Unsolicited Press of Portland, Oregon. Poet Thomas Centolella author of Almost Human (Tupelo Press, winner of the Dorset Prize),Terra Firma, Lights & Mysteries, and Views from along the Middle Way (Copper Canyon), notes the following about Cathryn’s work: “Focused chiefly on the domestic life, with all its “important confusion,” but also ranging into the transpersonal, Shea holds a particular regard for subjects that have vanished or are on the verge of vanishing, and does her best to rescue them with her appealingly quirky style, sometimes comic, sometimes melancholy, and always vested with affection.” Follow Cathryn on Twitter: @cathy_shea.

Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog - on Zoom!
2021-04-13 19:00 - 20:30 | Zoom
The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and host Gillian Wegener are pleased to welcome Sixteen Rivers Press poets Stella Beratlis and Dane Cervine Second Tuesday Poetry on Tuesday April 13, 2021. Join the reading via Zoom at 7 pm: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/94208575176 and sign up for Open Mic (3 mins each poet) following the featured poets.
Open Mic signup: https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday

Stella Beratlis grew up in a second-generation Greek-American family in Northern California. Her first collection of poems, Alkali Sink, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2015 and was a nominee for the Northern California Book Awards in poetry. Her work has also appeared in numerous journals, including Harbor Review, Penumbra, Song of the San Joaquin, In-Posse Review, and California Quarterly, as well as in the anthologies The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010) and California Fire and Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology (Story Streets, 2020). She is coeditor of the collection More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets (Quercus Review Press, 2011) and served as the poet laureate of Modesto from 2016 to 2020. Beratlis lives and works as a librarian in Modesto.
About Dust Bowl Venus:
With tenderness, wit, and humor, Dust Bowl Venus explores the fragility of love, good health, and the Earth. Rooted not just in the city of Modesto but also in the music, legends, and community of the Central Valley, these poems brilliantly reflect a struggle to find beauty in the contradictions of our contemporary lives. Amazingly thoughtful and musical, these are poems we should all read. —Judy Halebsky, author of Spring and a Thousand Years and Sky=Empty
“The poems in Stella Beratlis’s Dust Bowl Venus ring with the clarity of a shovel strike against stone, each line cracking against the next, igniting spark after glorious spark. And yet, like the seasonal lake bed on which Modesto sits, like the many hands ‘making mud out of dry soil,’ every poem aches toward tenderness. In one poem, Beratlis asks ‘What grows here?’ before revealing the bounty—heirloom tomatoes, holy basil, kindness—that can be coaxed from this ‘city of drought.’ But darker things grow here, too: a tumor ‘the consistency of a potato,’ fear, terror that ‘builds cell by sticky cell.’ Here, to grow, and to love, is to risk vulnerability. These’“bone-and-ligament / narratives’ of grief and yearning, illness and healing, perseverance and resistance, beat with so much heart in this fiercely beautiful book.” —Erin Rodoni, author of Body, in Good Light and A Landscape for Loss
“Stella Beratlis’s Dust Bowl Venus animates California’s Central Valley as a postmodern Prometheus, an eco-sapient Frankenstein with whom we wrangle, wrestle, and fall madly in love. With sass and grit and grace, Beratlis’s craft is brilliant in its imagistic associations that jolt and jump cut in powers of ten. These poems stir us with the urgency of the Anthropocene and form a ‘mycorrhizal web’ that connects us to the mantle of deep time.” —Rosa Lane, author of Chouteau’s Chalk and Tiller North

Dane Cervine is a poet whose recent books include Earth Is a Fickle Dancer (Main Street Rag), and The Gateless Gate – Polishing the Moon Sword, from Saddle Road Press in Hawaii. Previous poetry books include Kung Fu of the Dark Father, How Therapists Dance, The Jeweled Net of Indra, and What a Father Dreams. Dane’s poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, the Atlanta Review, Caesura, and been nominated for a Pushcart. His work appears in The SUN, the Hudson Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Sycamore Review, and Pedestal Magazine, among others. You can read more about Dane’s work at his blog: https://danecervine.typepad.com/
About The World Is God’s Language:
“Dane Cervine’s new book, The World Is God’s Language, is a raft for troubled souls, a balm for aching hearts, and a tree of koan-like wisdom nuggets to be squirreled away and returned to again and again. These prose poems often address loss and difficulties but with a lightness of touch that emphasizes the spiritual lessons they can embody. . . . Dane Cervine steadies us with his attention to each word, his deceptive simplicity of language, and his calibrated spirituality—which outlines mysteries, rather than attempting to fill them in. These remarkable poems are Rumi-like pearls.”
—David Sullivan, author of Seed Shell Ash
“Dane Cervine’s poems cast their attention on the everyday—his father’s slippers, an orange cat, the last biscuit in a box—and find the extraordinary in what’s in front of all of us. Even when the poems take place in distant locales, Cervine makes magic with simplicity. Hand in hand, he takes his readers to the edge, and willingly, we jump with him.”
—Patrice Vecchione, author of My Shouting, Shattered, Whispering Voice: A Guide to Writing Poetry & Speaking Your Truth

Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog - on Zoom
2021-05-11 19:00 - 20:30 | Zoom
The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and host Stella Beratlis are pleased to feature poets Lelania Fowler and Salvatore Salerno for Second Tuesday Poetry on Tuesday May 11, 2021. Join the reading via Zoom at 7 pm (https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/92855890148) and sign up for open mic (3 mins each poet, maximum 10 poets) following the featured poets.
Zoom link: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/92855890148
Open Mic signup: https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday

Lelania Fowler
Born and reared on the Eastside of Santa Barbara, California, Lelania Fowler experienced a Chicano/Hippie hybrid childhood. Later as a homeless teen, she bounced between Long Beach, Hollywood, and her hometown of Santa Barbara before relocating to Sacramento. In the late 1980s, she became part of a thriving music and arts scene and she began songwriting for local musicians.She writes about PTSD, sexual violence, California nature themes, and is a mental health activist.Her poetry has most recently been published in Quiet Rooms, a global anthology published by Cold River Press. Under a Milk Glass Moon is her first collection of poetry.
About Under a Milk Glass Moon:
“An excellent debut collection of poetry. Lelania’s long strophic lines and sparkler-like images propel these excursions into another realm. The work is not lyrical or narrative but cuts a lovely landscape between these genres. Refreshing to read and re-read.” –D.R. Wagner
“Lelania Fowler’s Under A Milk Glass Moon is, I am convinced, a collection of hymns to the Hindu goddess Kali, Mother of All, adorned in her necklace of human heads. There is a female energy in this writing to which I, as a male, have been blind and deaf, a feminine language in which I am not fluent. Even so, the poems themselves contain keys to help me unlock doors I
never knew existed.” —Robert Lee Haycock

Salvatore Salerno
Salvatore Salerno has an M.F.A. from University of North Carolina, where he was awarded The Academy of American Poets University Prize. He is retired from teaching English and Drama at Grace Davis High School. More than 120 of his poems have been published in numerous periodicals. His latest poetry book is Hello, Posterity. He has also independently published volumes of nonfiction, plays, and short stories.
Salvatore is a board member of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center, and he is also the president of the Stanislaus Audubon Society. He is the current poet laureate of Modesto.

Poetry on Sunday Series
2021-05-23 14:00 - 16:00 | Zoom
Please join us for the May edition of MoSt’s quarterly Poetry On Sunday Readings on Sunday, May 23rd at 2:00 P. M. While we look forward to a time we can all gather again at the Carnegie Arts Center, this time we’ll be on ZOOM. Join us, too, for the Open Mic time following the featured readers!
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85841157090
Click here to download the PDF flyer.

Josiah Luis Alderete is a full-blooded Pocho, Spanglish-speaking poeta who has been an active part of la Area Bahia’s spoken word scene for over twenty years. He was a founding member of outspoken word group “The Molotov Mouths” and is the curator and host of the long-running monthly Chicanx/Latinx reading series “Speaking Axolotl” which happens the 3rd Thursday of every month in el Zoom mundo. Josiah’s book of poems, Baby Axolotls y Old Pochos is being released this April from Black Freighter Press.
Whether sharing stages with legendary beat poets or your favorite Hip Hop emcees, Andru Defeye’s unorthodox writing and performance style has made him a fixture behing microphones around the country. 2020 saw the release of his critically acclaimed Frequency album, followed shortly after by his crowning as the youngest Poet Laureate in California capitol history. From Sacramento to Staten Island and SXSW, Andru served as the Director of Communications for Sol Collective from 2009-2020. In 2014 Defeye founded Zero Forbidden Goals, a support system for creatives dedicated to innovating arts equity, experiences, and education. ZFG’s guerilla art activations including National Guerilla Poetry Month, Chainlink Poetry, and The Intersection have been covered and recreated around the globe.
Angela Drew is a mother, dancer, poet, and spoken word performer who has loved the rhythm of words for as long as she can remember. Born in Berkeley, CA, she began writing at age eight and has always understood that words have the power to soothe, stir, or solidify connection. Thus, her lifelong love affair with storytelling began. Angela has performed at various venues throughout Modesto, Sacramento and Bay Areas, including Modesto Junior College, Modesto’s inaugural “Ill List Poetry Slam” at the State Theater, the Gallo Center for the Arts, in a Sankofa Community Theater production of The Journey—The African American Experience, and the Hildegard Festival of Women in the Arts, Turlock and the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center’s poetry event “Words Worth Speaking,” to name a few. Angela’s spoken word piece, “BWE: The Black Woman Experience” was recently featured at the 2020 NAACP Modesto/Stanislaus Virtual Black Graduates Recognition Ceremony and her poetry was included in COLLISION VI, the February 2020 exhibit at the Mistlin Gallery which featured poet-photographer collaborations.

Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog - on Zoom!
2021-06-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Zoom
The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and host Stella Beratlis are pleased to feature poets Indigo Moor and Jennifer K. Sweeney for Second Tuesday Poetry on Tuesday June 8, 2021. Join the reading via Zoom at 7 pm (https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/94454258218). Open mic (3 mins each poet, maximum 10 poets) following the featured poets.
Join reading: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/94454258218
Open mic following featured readers. To sign up: https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday

Jennifer K. Sweeney
Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Foxlogic, Fireweed, winner of the Backwaters Prize from Backwaters Press/University of Nebraska. Her other collections are Little Spells (New Issues Press, 2015), How to Live on Bread and Music (Perugia Press), and Salt Memory (Main Street Rag). She is the recipient of many awards, including the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Perugia Press Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. She teaches poetry workshops at the University of Redlands in California, and is known for a decade-long practice of private instruction and manuscript critique.
Foxlogic, Fireweed can be purchased from the University of Nebraska Press, linked from Jennifer’s website: https://www.jenniferksweeney.com/
About FOXLOGIC, FIREWEED
“Foxlogic, Fireweed is a torn map of a state where all words are proximate to mystery. Venturing into terra incognita, into territory that might be anima mundi, maybe, reader, you think you know the lineaments, but they are altered. Altared. Yes, to dream space, but wilder, wider—this metal into bird, stone into air, mother into vulpine. Sweeney is breathing strangeness into a small body of words, and the expanses open exponentially.”—Marsha de la O
​“The logic of Foxlogic, Fireweed is human and humane; it’s the logic of a penetrative tenderness and an embodiment always on the verge of dispersing into fox, or deer, or rain. . . . These are not bandwagon poems. They don’t mug for the camera. Rather, they enact a love ‘sourced in loneliness’ where ‘with our little keys of witness’ we find each other—the very definition of the lyric poem.”—Diane Seuss

Indigo Moor
Indigo Moor is the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Sacramento. His fourth book of poetry, Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something, took second place in the University of Nebraska Press’ Backwater Prize. His second book, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, won Northwestern University Press’s Cave Canem prize. His first and third books, Tap-Root and In the Room of Thirsts & Hungers, were both part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series. Indigo is an adjunct professor at Dominican University and visiting faculty for Dominican’s MFA program, teaching poetry and short fiction.
Indigo is a former faculty member at the Stonecoast MFA Program, where he graduated in 2012 with an MFA in poetry, fiction, and scriptwriting. He’s a playwright as well: his full-length stageplay, Live! at the Excelsior, was a finalist for the Images Theatre Playwright Award, and the subsequent screenplay has been optioned for a full-length film.
Indigo is a Cave Canem fellow, former resident artist at 916 ink, and a graduate member of the Artist’s Residency Institute for Teaching Artists.
A 10-year veteran of the US Navy and a twice-decorated Gulf War Veteran, Indigo divides his time between writing, teaching, and Integrated Circuit Layout Designer for computer companies.
About EVERYBODY’S JONESIN’ FOR SOMETHING
“Narratives don’t always belong to history’s victors,’’ writes Indigo Moor. If this line gives you pause, I strongly suggest you carry Moor’s brilliant book, Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something, home with you. In this dazzling book, you will read just how closely this poet has been paying attention, to us, to his histories, foreign and domestic, to our mighty (and sometimes mighty confusing) nation. Jonesin’ is a verse flashlight to all the corners you thought no one was supposed to pay attention to, line by beautifully crafted line, truth by earned truth. You’ll reach the last line of the last poem, and trust me, that’s when the hunger for more will begin.”—Cornelius Eady, author of The War Against the Obvious
“Indigo Moor’s new collection shuttles between searing rebuke and hopeful anguish with accents of hard-edged humor. What I love most is the clarity of thought—the no-holds-barred, no-punches-pulled sharpness of the language that carries the reader through each poem, jonesin’ for the next. Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something invites you out of your complacency and fuels a restlessness that reminds you that you’re alive, that this is no time for sleeping.”—Tim Seibles, author of One Turn around the Sun

Poetry On Sunday Series featuring Dane Cervine & Stella Beratlis
2021-08-15 14:00 - 16:00 | CA
Join host Gary Thomas and our featured readers Stella Beratlis and Dane Cervine for the Sunday, August 15th edition of MoSt’s Poetry On Sunday Series readings on Zoom, beginning at 2:00 P. M. Pacific Time.
Stella Beratlis is the author of Alkali Sink (2015) and her latest collection, Dust Bowl Venus (May 2021). Her poems have appeared in the anthologies The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Franciso Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010) and California Fire and Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology (Story Streets, 2020). Beratis served as Modesto’s poet laureate from 2016-2020 and works as a librarian there.
Dane Cervine is a poet whose recent books include Earth Is a Fickle Dancer (Main Street Rag), and The Gateless Gate – Polishing the Moon Sword, from Saddle Road Press in Hawaii. Previous poetry books include Kung Fu of the Dark Father, How Therapists Dance, The Jeweled Net of Indra, and What a Father Dreams. Dane’s poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, the Atlanta Review, Caesura, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His work appears in The SUN, the Hudson Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Sycamore Review, and Pedestal Magazine, among others. You can read more about Dane at his blog: https://danecervine.typepad.com/
Here is the Zoom link to the reading:
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Stella’s latest book, Dust Bowl Venus, and Dane’s new book, The World is God’s Language, have recently been published by Sixteen Rivers Press. For more information about the authors and the books, go to these pages on the Sixteen Rivers site:
https://sixteenrivers.org/authors/stellaberatlis/
https://sixteenrivers.org/authors/dane-cervine/
Our usual Open Mic Time will follow the featured readers. We look forward to seeing you!

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Julia B. Levine & Matthew Lippman plus open mic
2021-10-12 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and host Stella Beratlis are pleased to welcome poets Julia B. Levine and Matthew Lippman on Tuesday, October 12, 2021. Join the reading via Zoom at 7 pm: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/91357899430. Sign up for Open Mic (3 mins each poet) following the featured poets.
JULIA B. LEVINE
Julia B. Levine has won numerous awards for her work, including the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry for her fourth collection of poetry, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, (LSU press 2014), first prize in the 2019 Bellevue Literary Review poetry contest, 2019 Public Poetry Awards, 2018 Tiferet Poetry Prize, as well as the 2003 Tampa Review Poetry Prize for Ask, and the 1998 Anhinga Poetry prize as well as a bronze medal from Foreword magazine for her first collection, Practicing for Heaven. Her fifth and most recent collection, Ordinary Psalms, is now available from LSU press.
MATTHEW LIPPMAN
Matthew Lippman’s collection Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful (2020) is published by Four Way Books. It was the recipient of the 2018 Levis Prize. He is the author of 5 other poetry collections.
Tuesday, October 12, 2021 at 7 pm PDT
Zoom link: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/91357899430
Open Mic signup: https://forms.gle/j6dsvm31MA2377Pu6
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Meeting ID: 913 5789 9430

Poetry on Sunday Series
2021-11-21 14:00 - 16:00 | Zoom
Poetry On Sunday Series Reading: November 21, 2021
Join host Gary Thomas and our featured readers Gerald Fleming, Michael Meyerhofer, And Melchor Sahagun III for the November 21st, 2021 edition of MoSt’s Poetry On Sunday Series readings on Zoom, beginning at 2:00 P. M. Pacific Time.
Gerald Fleming‘s The Bastard and the Bishop is his third Hanging Loose Press title. Previous are Night of Pure Breathing and One, an experiment in monosyllabic prose poems. He’s published two books with Sixteen Rivers Press (Swimmer Climbing Onto Shore and The Choreographer) and recently edited The Collected Poetry and Prose of Lawrence Fixel, also a Sixteen Rivers title. He’s edited literary magazines traditional, vitreous, and epistolary.
Michael Meyerhofer’s fifth poetry book, Ragged Eden, was published by Glass Lyre Press in 2019. He has been the startled recipient of the James Wright Poetry Award, the Brick Road Poetry Book Prize, and other honors. He is also the author of a fantasy series, and serves as the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review. For more information and an embarrassing childhood photo, visit troublewithhammers.com.
Melchor Sahagun III says, “I do stuff; like Poetry, Skateboarding, Music, Comic Books, that sort of stuff. I’m in my late thirties, but I somehow feel simultaneously younger and much older than I am—it’s weird. I’m weird. You’re weird. Life is weird. I don’t really know what I’m doing, to be honest, but that’s all right because neither do you. I like my cats, A LOT. I like you a lot, too.”
Our usual Open Mic Time will follow the featured readers. We look forward to seeing you!
MoSt Poetry Center is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: MoSt’s Poetry On Sunday Series Reading–November 21, 2021
Time: Nov 21, 2021 02:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Second Tuesday Poetry featuring George Higgins and Rick Bursky
2021-12-14 19:00 - 20:30 | CA
The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to welcome poets George Higgins and Rick Bursky on Tuesday, December 14, 2021. Register in advance for this meeting: https://tinyurl.com/2p8k6saw. Sign up for Open Mic (3 mins each poet) following the featured poets: https://forms.gle/vYexC9AiS7d7Cgeo7. Hosted by Stella Beratlis.
George Higgins’s book, There There, was published by Kelsay Books/White Violet Press. He has been published in Best American Poetry and more recently in Prairie Schooner and Catamaran.
Rick Bursky’s most recent book, Let’s Become a Ghost Story, is out from BOA Editions. His previous book, I’m No Longer Troubled by The Extravagance, is also from BOA Editions. He teaches poetry for The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension.

Many Voices, One Community: Gillian Wegener and Salvatore Salerno
2022-04-28 19:30 - 20:30 | CA
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center & Stanislaus County Library Present Many Voices, One Community, featuring Gillian Wegener and Salvatore Salerno, emeritus and current Poets Laureate of Modesto
Celebrate National Poetry Month by sharing your poetry! Read your poetry, or poems from one of your favorite poets. Reading time limited to three minutes per person.
Thursday, April 28
at 7 p.m. on Zoom
Register at www.stanislauslibrary.org to receive the Zoom link.

Second Tuesday Poetry Reading featuring Susan Kelly-Dewitt & Linda Toren
2022-05-10 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry, featuring Susan Kelly-Dewitt and Linda Toren.
Hosted by Gary Thomas
Date: Tuesday, May 10, 2022
Time: 7:00 pm PST
on Zoom–RSVP required:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIpf–tqTwjHtzOiKfx1CE232QV992N-gyG
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
About Susan Kelly-Dewitt
Susan Kelly-DeWitt is the author of The Gatherer’s Alphabet, just published in 2022, Gravitational Tug (Main Street Rag, 2020), Spider Season (Cold River Press, 2016), and The Fortunate Islands (Marick Press, 2008).
Her work has been included in many national and regional anthologies including The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Autumn House Press), When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press), : In Whatever Houses We May Visit: an Anthology of Poems That Have Inspired Physicians (American College of Physicians) and Claiming the Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women’s Poetry (Beacon Press). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, North American Review and many others. She has been featured on Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily.
Susan has been the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, The Chicago Literary Award from Another Chicago Magazine, the Bazzanella Award for Short Fiction and a number of Pushcart nominations. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the Northern California Book Reviewers Association.
Over the years she has worked as a freelance writer and poetry columnist for the Sacramento Bee and Sacramento Union as the editor of the on-line journal Perihelion and the print journal Quercus. She has been a California Poet-in-the-Schools, Artistic Director for the Women’s Wisdom Project arts program for homeless and low-income women, an educator, and an artist in the prisons. She lives in Sacramento, California, where she is a contributing editor for Poetry Flash and a reviewer for Library Journal. Previously she was an instructor for the University of California, Davis and a blogger for Autumn House Press’ Coal Hill Review. She is also an exhibiting visual artist.
Gatherer’s Alphabet is the first book in Gunpowder Press’s California Poets Series.
Praise for Gatherer’s Alphabet:
These luscious poems feel like small museums of infinite wonder. Gallery, butterfly, stars in autumn. The wisdom of nature, the work of angels, what women endure—I love these poems. A timeless grace breathes through this marvelous book, this bounty you’ll be grateful that you read. —Lee Herrick, Fresno Poet Laureate (2015-17) author of Scar and Flower, Gardening Secrets of the Dead, and This Many Miles from Desire
Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s concentrations come to life as if in a studio, with watercolor washes and ink accentuations. As well as mother and father, ghosts and angels, words are animated characters urgently communicating— whistling to animals or dogwood gods, pinches of anger too—a tool to save us. Is she holding a pen—or a moth by its wings? Poems like “Words” and “The Thorne Miniatures” and the title poem gaze multi-eyed at the reader from the palm of her offering hand. — Sandra McPherson, author of The 5150 Poems and Speech Crush
What I love about Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s poems are the colors, how they “hold / themselves out / to be touched.” Her mother is described as having “storm-colored hair.” Silence is a “white bulb.” The past is a minefield of blue flowers. This bringing together of nature and mind, the mundane and the transcendent, is the result of the poet’s unrestrained sympathy for all living things. Kelly-DeWitt’s companions in this vision-quest are O’Keeffe and Van Gogh, artists who paint not the appearance of field and cloud, but the primal energy beneath the surface. The act of seeing is the true subject here. We are fortunate to have Kelly-DeWitt to guide us through this journey. —Michael Simms, editor of Vox Populi, author of Nightjar
Coming from a world “sheltered by cold leaves of starlight,” Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s powerful new work serves as a garden for ghosts, windows, and angels capable of making ordinary events extraordinary. A sharp sense of loss is integral to Gatherer’s Alphabet, which is steeped in the particulars of memory, the pebbles, the dark pits. Here is an “impossible country of imagination“ that must be visited over and over. —Maya Khosla, Poet Laureate Emerita of Sonoma County, author of All the Fires of Wind and Light
About Linda Toren
Linda Toren lives in the foothills of Calaveras County with her husband Theo, dogs, a cat, and many chickens. Linda is a retired teacher and director of Voices of Wisdom through Manzanita Writers Press (MWP). She has presented poetry workshops for children and adults, publishing schoolwide collections of poetry and art at local elementary schools for more than 15 years.
Her poetry appears in many collections, including Manzanita: Poetry and Prose of the Mother Lode & Sierra (MWP 1995–2008), Voices of Wisdom (MWP 2018, 2019, 2022), Out of the Fire (MWP 2017), Collision V: an Intersection of Poetry and Photography (2018), and more. This year, her first full-length collection, Raven Braids the Wind: A Life in Syllables, was published by Manzanita Writers Press.
Raven Braids the Wind started with a simple assignment in elementary school— write a haiku. That first haiku—Lonely people live/within themselves like dusty/ books upon a shelf—is a senryu (a haiku poem focused on personal reflection or comment about the self or world.) Thousands of haiku later, this poetic form has become a daily journey in which the author explores and translates the natural world and the inner world of introspection. Whether or not you write haiku, you will be able to appreciate their accessibility and simplicity and find yourself opening doors and windows to companionable thoughts and feelings.
Linda produces a community radio program dedicated to poetry, prose, nonfiction literary news, lyrics, and the celebration of thoughts and language at KQBM Blue Mountain Radio (KQBM.org).
Praise for Raven Braids the Wind:

Linda Toren has graced readers with her haiku meditations on the world—both the natural world and the chaotic one humans have wrought. Her poems take us on a seasonal journey through pine forests and chicken coops, through road-side sweet peas, on ravens’ wings, and through the dreams and puzzlement of modern life. Toren’s careful attention allows the reader a window into her love and compassion for these worlds, in all their flawed wonder. One haiku reads “How do I gather/ the threads of my life into/ some kind of order?” Lucky for us, in this collection, Linda Toren does just that, and the order revealed is deeply personal, poignant, and beautiful. —Gillian Wegener, author of This Sweet Haphazard (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2017)

Raven Braids the Wind by Linda Toren is a collection of lovely and thought-provoking haiku and senryu graced with charming artwork. Toren’s haiku transport the reader into the garden, the busy barnyard, and the woodlands where birds, plants, animals, and weather impart wisdom and elicit questions that Toren transposes into concise and musical language. Her senryu distill the vicissitudes of emotion, recent sociopolitical perturbations, and pandemic upheaval, deftly portraying the human condition in clean, contemplative lines. The juxtaposition of these two poetic forms reflects the dichotomy of contentment and disquiet, the eternal and the ephemeral, in measured syllables that brilliantly convey vivid imagery and lucid observations. Linda Toren’s Raven Braids the Wind is a treasure. –Linda Scheller, author of Wind and Children (Main Street Rag, June 2022) and Fierce Light (FutureCycle Press, 2017)

Second Tuesday Poetry presents Field Studies: Poems We Love
2022-08-09 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
[Field research is defined as a qualitative method of data collection that aims to observe, interact and understand people while they are in a natural environment.]
Second Tuesday Poetry presents Field Studies, Poems We Love
FIELD STUDIES. Maybe poets are social scientists at heart: We ask questions and seek to understand the world, ourselves, each other. For this open mic reading, please come prepared to read a poem that you love–one in which witness, documentation, analysis, and/or understanding are key. You’ll have 3-4 minutes to read your poem(s). Hosted by Stella Beratlis.
Date: Tuesday, August 9, 2022
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Zoom RSVP required: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAkd-yuqzIuHN2hEdFucto5F3xrkxX-lplH
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Gary Thomas and Ian Miller
2022-09-13 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Gary Thomas and Ian Miller
Join us at 7 pm on Zoom as we feature Gary Thomas, reading from his new collection All the Connecting Lights. He is joined by poet Ian Miller of Modesto.
Hosted by Stella Beratlis
Date: Tuesday, Sept 13, 2022
Time: 7:00 pm PST
On Zoom–Please RSVP for link
Open mic follows featured poets. Three minutes per reader; please sign up for open mic.
Gary Thomas
Gary Thomas taught eighth grade language arts for thirty-one years, and junior college English for seven—sharing and discussing at least one poem each day with his students. He has presented poetry workshops for statewide organizations, festivals, and conferences. He has had poems published in In the Grove and The Comstock Review, among others, and in the anthology More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets. He is currently vice president of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center, is a member of the Curriculum Study Commission and of the local writing group known as The Licensed Fools. A full-length collection, ALL THE CONNECTING LIGHTS, was released in August 2022 from Finishing Line Press.
All the Connecting Lights
All the Connecting Lights is a marvel, an homage to the unnoticed and ordinary, a tender and sweeping reckoning of childhood, nature, the mystery of epilepsy, and how our lives and memories intersect. Thomas sees nuances and symmetries that most of us don’t. I reveled in the joy of “staying lost” and the grace of “spring rationales.” I’ve been waiting for this book. It is a chronicle of wonder by a truly gifted poet.
–Lee Herrick, author of Scar and Flower
Gary Thomas’ poems range widely and feel deeply. From his childhood on a Central California peach farm to the tragic Battle of Aleppo to imagined lives and voices of others, Thomas’ poems strike chords of generosity and nostalgia and wonder and, one of his favorite words, grace. Reading these poems allows us as the readers to take part in worlds that feel at once familiar and lost to us, where Neruda and a farm woman share an unlikely birthday tea, and where we all, in reading each of these portraits of a moment in time, are able to “Gladly bear joy’s burden.”
–Gillian Wegener, author of This Sweet Haphazard
In Gary Thomas’ generous full-length collection All the Connecting Lights, his poetry traverses and pays homage to both real and imaginary landscapes—from the Great Central Valley to a peach farm outside Empire, California to castle rooms “built in the exosphere.” Striking images abound. In “Oleanders and Whoopee Cushions,” he writes, “a robin’s burst blue egg / a stiff black widow in her viscous web / earwigs belly up or ready to boil out at a touch.” These are poems that artfully document moments of the human experience, “Here abide the lost, those / abandoned to swirl among / dust motes, free range sheep, /and unused memory, / whose textures and traces / might still be familiar and felt, / if only in this moment.” Thomas’ debut collection connects the lights with poetic grace and emotional honesty.
–Maw Shein Win, author of Storage Unit for the Spirit House

Ian Miller
Ian Miller is a Californian poet, born and mostly raised in a little passing town called Oakdale. He is the author of June 30th, 2022 published by Lulu Press (2022) and recently published collections Neon Promises and Neon Promises: Pinky Promise Edition, both published by Lulu Press (2022). He is currently working on two more projects; one is titled Nothing’s Changed, and the other is titled Gertie, Bear, and Bugaroo: A Mother and Son Project. Neither have an expected completion date yet. Ian currently works at the Modesto Junior College’s Library & Learning Center as an Instructional Support Assistant, primarily helping to supervise the Writing and Embedded Tutors. He is also working towards a double major in Psychology and English with the end goal being to enter into higher education.
The aforementioned books can be found for purchase here: https://linktr.ee/iandmiller

Second Tuesday Poetry Online featuring Cyrus Cassells & James Fujinami Moore
2022-10-11 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry Online featuring Cyrus Cassells and James Fujinami Moore
Join us as we welcome two tremendous poets to our Second Tuesday Poetry series: State of Texas Poet Laureate Cyrus Cassells and James Fujinami Moore of Los Angeles. Both have new collections published by Four Way Books. We’re pleased to welcome these poets to our Central Valley poetry community. Open mic follows featured poets, 3 min per poet, please. Sign up for open mic.
Hosted by Stella Beratlis
Date: Tuesday, October 11, 2022
Time: 7:00 pm PST
RSVP for Zoom link
Cyrus Cassells
A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, Cyrus Cassells has also been a recipient of a Lambda Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Lannan Literary Award. His first book, The Mud Actor, was a 1981 National Poetry Series Selection. His 2018 volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award, and the Balcones Poetry Prize. His Catalan translations, Still Life With Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas was awarded the Texas Institute of Letters’ Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2018 and 2019. He was nominated for a 2019 Pulitzer Prize for his cultural criticism for The Washington Spectator. My Gingerbread Shakespeare, his first novel, and his seventh book of poems, Is There Room For Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? were published in 2021. In 2021, he was appointed Texas poet laureate, and in 2022, Cassells received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship and his eighth collection The World That the Shooter Left Us was published by Four Way Press. He lives in Austin and is a tenured full professor at Texas State University.
About The World That the Shooter Left Us
“Wrestling in the clutches of fury and mourning, Cassells—long a master purveyor of both the splendor and contradictions of the natural world, as well as the voluptuary elements of the self—turns his consummate clear-eyed gaze to a bleak and burgeoning brutality that threatens our days, siphons the spirit and challenges the realm of the poet. The World the Shooter Left Us is a world defined by stark boundaries and firepower, chalk outlines, rampant injustices and histories tainted with each and every version of sin. Cassells, a wily and relentless witness, doesn’t tiptoe through the maelstrom or allow the reader to turn away. Instead, he becomes the writer that this moment needs—one with the lyrical skill and decades of experience to craft this revelatory guidebook for our grief.” —Patricia Smith
“The World That the Shooter Left Us is poetry of conscience at its most crafted and compassionate. The title poem is an elegy for a beloved Latino lawyer, murdered by a white assailant over a parking space, that forces us to contemplate all we have lost in a society bristling with guns, rage and bigotry. However, the title of another poem captures the essence of this eloquent collection: “The Only Way to Fight the Plague is Decency.” In the face of plague after plague—COVID-19, lethal police violence, kids in cages, the end of asylum, sexual exploitation, Trumpism—these poems show us a way out, a vision of transcendence through reclamation of our humanity. Cyrus Cassells demonstrates, through the resplendent decency of these poems, that the world the shooter left us is not only a world of death, but life, not only bullets, but poetry.”
–Martin Espada

James Fujinami Moore
James Fujinami Moore’s debut collection indecent hours was published by Four Way Books in 2022. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street’s 4×2, The Brooklyn Rail, Guesthouse, The Margins, the Pacifica Literary Review, and Prelude. He has been a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow, a Bread Loaf Work-Study Fellow, and the Four Way Books Fellow at the Frost Place Conference in Poetry. He received his MFA from Hunter College in 2016, and lives in Los Angeles.
About indecent hours
“James Fujinami Moore’s powerful poems keep intimacy active in their measure and perspectives, working through a wide range of public and private histories. They close in and zoom out with an intensity of tonal scale, one that binds an elegance steeped in experience with all the irreducible cuts and marks the poems invoke and depict. Those cuts and marks may be rendered with a surrealist’s touch or a realist’s blunt recall, as needed, and with a precise understanding of the various physical and emotive overlapping roles the glimpse, the conversation, the story, the touch, and the brawl each retain. indecent hours is a terrific book.” -Anselm Berrigan
“James Fujinami Moore’s poems possess the uncanny capacity to be at once unsettled and unnervingly lucid. It is this particular power that fuels his searing investigations—into the intimate relationships between representation and violence, into how families and countries take shape around those who are missing. Moore’s poems are urgent, achingly searching, unflinching. Here is a poet who moves as he needs to—flipping foreground and background, rewinding and replaying, refusing the distortions of fear.” –Mary Syzbist

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcvduuqqD4rGdz7w9BSPEysavrDAG4cdbBq
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Kiss Me Like You Voted: Election Night Open Mic
2022-11-08 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, wrote the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1821 in the essay, “A Defence of Poetry.” By this, he meant that poetry reflects the real world and that the poet’s imagination is the faculty which allows us to perceive beauty in the world–thereby helping create civilization itself. Poets are makers of civilization, no less–hence, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
With this in mind, we invite you to the Election Day installment of the Second Tuesday Poetry series. The November 8 reading is a virtual open mic around the questions: How do we reckon the promise of this country with its violent past and present? How can we love when so much is on the line? How can we NOT love?
Open mic 15 poets max; 3 minutes per person–sign up to read at https://forms.gle/izdLKgzryo1uFzwLA
RSVP for Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYscOqhpjgrGNZ9calCIAyo_9KPb7XWmAy_

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Beverly Burch and Linda Marie Prather
2022-12-13 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry, featuring Beverly Burch and Linda Marie Prather. Hosted by Modesto poet laureate emeritus Stella Beratlis.
Date: Tuesday, Dec 13, 2022
Time: 7:00 pm PST
RSVP for Zoom link
Open mic follows featured readers. Please sign up and plan to read for about 3 minutes.
Beverly Burch
Beverly Burch’s new book, Leave Me a Little Want, was published by Terrapin Books this year. Her last book, Latter Days of Eve (BkMk Press), won the John Ciardi Prize. How a Mirage Works (Sixteen Rivers) was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award. Her first book, Sweet to Burn (2004), won the Gival Poetry Prize and Lambda Literary Award. Beverly’s poems and prose can be found in 32 Poems, Gulf Coast, Southern Review, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, New England Review, Barrow Street, Smartish Pace, and Grist. She also has two psychoanalytic books on women’s sexual and gender relations: On Intimate Terms (University of Illinois) and Other Women (Columbia University). Beverly grew up in Atlanta, GA and has lived many years in Oakland, CA with her wife.
About Leave Me a Little Want
“I love this book and its urgent attention to language and form in the “treacherous province” of our current times. Burch never turns away from the coexistence of the beautiful and the bloody, the tedious and the risky, and so I not only trust her, but feel jolted awake.”
-Julia Levine, Ordinary Psalms

Linda Maria Prather
Linda Marie Prather has five published chapbooks, the latest Searching Shadows, Finding Shade, (Cactus Wren Press). Unforced Rhythms, (Finishing Line Press) won 3rd place in the NLAPW 2014 Letters Competition. Her full-length book, Summer Song, was published in 2016 by Pen Women Press. She edits for Song of The San Joaquin and is a member of National League of American Pen Women, in Arts and Letters.
Her poetry appears in More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets. Linda’s published
widely and received prizes from Penumbra, Poets’ Dinner Contest, and the Ina Coolbrith Circle. She has won
the Golden Pegasus Award and has been featured poet twice for the Stanislaus Connections poetry column “A Gathering of Voices.” She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Brad Buchanan and Susan Cohen
2023-01-10 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Brad Buchanan and Susan Cohen, on Tuesday, January 10, 2023 at 7:00 p,m PST. Hosted by Stella Beratlis, city of Modesto poet laureate emeritus.
RSVP for Zoom link
Open Mic Signup: https://forms.gle/d51j2WqGmBrzrTLT9. 3 minutes per reader, please.
SUSAN COHEN
Susan Cohen is a journalist and poet in Berkeley, California. She has been a newspaper reporter, a contributing writer to the Washington Post Magazine, and a faculty member of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California. In 2013, she earned an MFA in poetry. Her third full-length book of poems, Democracy of Fire, was released from Broadstone Books on September 30, 2022; it was a finalist for the Washington Prize, Wilder Prize, and Richard Snyder Prize,
Susan’s second book of poems, A Different Wakeful Animal, won the 2015 David Martinson-Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press. It also was a runner-up for the Philip Levine Prize, finalist for the May Swenson Award, Blue Lynx Prize, and Richard Snyder Prize.
Susan’s first full-length book of poems, Throat Singing, was published in 2012 by Cherry Grove Collections. She also wrote two chapbooks: Backstroking (Unfinished Monument Press; 2005), which won the Acorn-Rukeyser Prize; and Finding the Sweet Spot (Finishing Line Press; 2009).
About Democracy of Fire
A thread of elegy runs through Democracy of Fire, Susan Cohen’s wise and wonderful new poetry collection. Tenderly, precisely, these poems record a litany of the world’s ongoing losses: “Greenland’s ice sheet pooling like tears into the ocean,” elephants, beetles, democracies, “languages left behind like cloaks,” and “our own bones interred without ceremony.” Cohen shows us our interconnectedness, a reminder of both the beauty and value of what’s at stake. Yet, paradoxically, this vision makes Democracy of Fire a deeply comforting book. Of the planet Mercury she writes, “…a pinprick ablaze for longer than our species will exist…Between us and it, there’s a distance far beyond air, and beyond despair.”
—Ellen Bass, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets & author of Indigo

Brad Buchanan
Brad Buchanan’s writings have appeared in nearly 200 journals, and he has also published 4 book-length collections of poetry: his latest, CHIMERA, was just published in November 2022. The Miracle Shirker (Poets Corner Press, 2005), Swimming the Mirror: Poems for My Daughter (Roan Press, 2008), and The Scars, Aligned: A Cancer Narrative (Finishing Line Press, 2019) as well as two academic books. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Sacramento State University. He was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma in February 2015, and underwent a stem cell transplant in 2016, which involved temporary vision loss and disability, as well as an ongoing illness: chronic Graft-versus-Host Disease.
About CHIMERA
Brad Buchanan‘s painfully stunning new collection, CHIMERA, continues his explorations of the monstrosities that cancer can create in the lives of human beings as they struggle through invasive testing, treatments, recovery, and the hope of being cancer-free that stem cell transplants offer. Buchanan…documents, reports, questions, disputes both himself and the world cancer and chimerism force him to confront. He helps us see and feel in a most visceral way what it means—for him, for us, for those he loves and those who love him—to be engaged in this struggle. “Cancer is not your standard bully, / it will not back down if confronted / with sufficiently brave defiance. / It doesn’t have a nervous system / to mobilize or sympathize. / The only martial arts it knows/ are patience, stealth and resilience.” These poems will surprise you with their tenacity, empathy and ingenious language.
–Susan Kelly-DeWitt, author of SPIDER SEASON (Cold River Press, 2016) and GRAVITATIONAL TUG (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2020)

Register in advance for this reading:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIkc-uopzIiE9CmsJAOxm1JzNtUdnMXYXqN
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Tamer Mostafa & Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
2023-02-14 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Tamer Mostafa and Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
Hosted by Stella Beratlis
Date: Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2023
Time: 7:00 pm PST
RSVP for Zoom link
Open Mic Signup: https://forms.gle/d51j2WqGmBrzrTLT9. 3 mins per reader, please.
TAMER MOSTAFA
Tamer Said Mostafa (pronouns: he/him/his), a radical social worker by day and poet by night, is a Stockton, California native whose poetry has appeared in over twenty literary journals and magazines, including Confrontation, Zone 3, and Freezeray. Tamer is a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee whose debut full-length book of poetry, Where Will I Find America? was released in August, 2021 and is available online. He is also the author of Which Way Will the Water Drag Our Bodies, published in 2020.Mostafa is a graduate of the Creative Writing program at University of California, Davis where he won the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Contest for Poetry. As an Arab-American Muslim, Tamer lives life through spirituality, community work, and the music of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony.
CAROL LYNN STEVENSON GRELLAS
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas lives in the Sierra Foothills and is a recent graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Writing program, where she received a Merit Scholarship. She is an eleven-time Pushcart Prize nominee and an eight-time Best of the Net nominee. In 2012 she won the Red Ochre Chapbook Contest, with her manuscript, Before I Go to Sleep. In 2018 her book In the Making of Goodbyes was nominated for The CLMP Firecracker Award in Poetry, and her poem A Mall in California took 2nd place for the Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize. In 2019 her chapbook An Ode to Hope in the Midst of Pandemonium was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards and Epitaph for the Beloved was nominated for The Northern California Book Award. Her latest collection of poems, Alice in Ruby Slippers, was short-listed for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize and awarded honorable mention in the Poetry category. You can find out more about Carol Lynn’s work by visiting her website: https://www.clgrellaspoetry.com/

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Rooja Mohassessey & Farnaz Fatemi
2023-03-14 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
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

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring 2023 Sixteen Rivers Press authors Matthew M. Monte & Joseph Zaccardi
2023-04-11 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
We are so excited to feature Matthew M. Monte and Joseph Zaccardi for our Second Tuesday reading on April 11, 2023.
Please RSVP to get Zoom link for reading: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUodeGrrzkjHdfBfZG3JJnhhyxHl8NFvfZ8
Hosted by Modesto poet laureate emeritus Stella Beratlis; open mic follows featured poets. (Open mic sign-up.)
MATTHEW MONTE
Matthew M. Monte grew up near San Francisco, California and went to the University of Hawaii-Manoa, where he studied botany. His fiction, poetry, book reviews, music reviews, journalism, and essays have appeared in Sidestream, Creosote Journal, Transfer, Ashcan Magazine, The Snackbar Collective, iNaturalist, Panorama, and the Poets 11 Anthologies (2014 and 2016). He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son. His debut collection, The Case of the Six-Sided Dream, won the 2017 Blue Light Poetry Prize.
https://www.matthew-monte.com/
All Tomorrow’s Train Rides is an odyssey of reading and poetic memory. What begins as a single day in a worker’s commute morphs into a Möbius loop of literary history and cultural consciousness. “Where do we read and whom?” is a question that drives the nostalgia, dread, and humor of this collection. Riddled with geographical coordinates and commentary, this book of interdependent poems explores the idea of “living in translation” and fuses the formal aesthetics of cartography to our relationships with people, places, books, and the natural world.
About ALL TOMORROW’S TRAIN RIDES
Through poetic cartography, Matthew Monte disembarks from a search of what ultimately is borderless. The topography of a land, of home, extending from San Francisco to Tepeyac to Downe places us in a position to feel the transit of time. We travel to where Monte coordinates the lingering as well as the vanishing points of a city. With a lush lexicon, he fuses historical allusions with aspects of spirituality to expound upon what each train ride reveals; in turn, around the next bend, we keep coming back. This is a ride to catch.
—Thea Matthews, author of Unearth [The Flowers]
Matthew Monte writes in the specifics of speech and memory, pulling the reader along his urban coastline of abandoned dreams and possible destinations. This extraordinary book is filled with the noise and silence of the everyday and is underscored throughout with beauty, examination, and compassion.
Read these fine poems and encounter some part of your own unvoiced life.
—Beau Beausoleil, author of A Glyphic House: New and Selected Poems 1976–2019
JOSEPH ZACCARDI
Joseph Zaccardi is the author of five books of poetry including, most recently, The Weight of Bodily Touches from Kelsay Books. His poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Poetry East, Atlanta Review, Rattle, and Salamander, among other journals. Zaccardi joined the Marin Poetry Center in 1996 and served as a board member from 2010 to 2013 and as the editor of the Marin Poetry Center Anthology in 2010–2012. Appointed poet laureate of Marin County, California, he served from 2013 to 2015. A member of the LGBTQ community, Zaccardi believes that to write a single poem is a minor miracle. He lives in Fairfax, California, with his husband, Dave, and their dog.

In his afterword to Songbirds of the Nine Rivers, Joseph Zaccardi recounts how, during his time as a Navy corpsman in the Vietnam War, he found refuge in a volume of ancient Chinese and Vietnamese poetry. His study, now lifelong, has borne fruit in this present volume, the ancients at his shoulder. At once a scholarly work, an homage, and a striking volume of new poems—not translations, not “versions”— this book provides readers with a multifaceted lens, forward, backward, yet always present—and always, even in grief, exultant.
About SONGBIRDS OF THE NINE RIVERS
The beauty of this book is in the lyric surprise, the parabolic of the Tang. If there are such things as true works of art, it is these poems that blend the physical and the eternal, the seen and the unseen. Zaccardi’s words draw from the uncanniness of nature in a startling way and reveal to us a sometimes violent, often beautiful, but always necessary world. A work such as Songbirds of the Nine Rivers,derived from both earth and heaven, is rare indeed.
––Ann Robinson, author of Stone Window
Historical, philosophical, and alchemical, these poems reenact the cosmos of the classical poet-ancestors of China and Vietnam through the awakened mind of an American poet. Joseph Zaccardi’s poetry enlarges human empathy and connects separated worlds. Listen to these songs! Every note is clear, fresh, and alive.
-–Jie Tian, author of Native Songs and Migration Songs
It is said that to hear music it is best to close your eyes, and that to hear poetry it is best to read the poems aloud. Joseph Zaccardi’s poetry is music to the ear. He lets us feel what he feels, lets us touch what he touches. His voice is song; his sounds are prayers. They wash over me, the way the sea washes over the sound of itself.
––Mai Sato, Yokohama College of Art and Design

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Aideed Medina and Ramón García
2023-07-11 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Aideed Medina and Ramón García, hosted by Stella Beratlis
Date: Tuesday, July 11, 2023
Time: 7:00 pm PST on Zoom–RSVP required:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYld-CrrzIiE9f-nC5FZF4UnTu3ZCbULvXC. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Open mic: 3 mins per poet, follows the featured readers. Open mic sign-up.
Aideed Medina
Aideed Medina is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, award winning spoken word artist and a playwright. She is a California Naturalist, and practices “flor y canto” as part of her poetic process and exploration of California’s natural history. Her work has appeared in Fresno State’s Club Austral Literary Magazine, Chicano Writers and Artists Association Journal, La Bloga, Poets Responding, Art of the Commune, Split This Rock, Nueva York Poetry Review, Di-Liio Revista Literaria, Artivista Anthology, as part of a collection of original art songs composed for The Opera Remix, Fresno Grand Opera, and co-writer of Eclectic Collective plays: Encounter Intuitive and Artista Invisible. Her debut collection, 31 Hummingbird, was just published earlier this year by Xingao Press. Aideed has a forthcoming full-length poetry collection, Segmented Bodies, from Prickly Pear Press coming later this year. In 2024, the Editorial Universitaria of the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in Mexico will be publishing her work poetry in a series that pairs Chicano-Mexican poets.
About 31 Hummingbird
31 Hummingbird | A suite of poems is the debut collection by Chicana poet Aideed Medina. 31 Hummingbird chronicles a human relationship, and ascends with the flights of hummingbirds. The hummingbird is a unique being and a metaphor of the racing of hearts, whose beating never fluctuates whether in mid-flight, hovering, being rejected, ejected, accepted or dive-bombing for the nectars and sugared waters of the embraces.
Aideed Medina’s hummingbird poems are cross-pollinators: She brushes our tongues and eyes with the poetics of aerodynamic words.
Her debut collection of humming-poems is an invitation to risk flying on the wings of feathered lightning. Up, down, across, forward, backward, fluttering like thunder and lightning, 31 Hummingbird invites close and patient reading, waiting for the hummingbird to appear and disappear in the flash of a few lines.
Ramón García
Ramón García is the author of two books of poetry The Chronicles (Red Hen Press, 2015) and Other Countries (What Books Press, 2010), and a monograph on the artist Ricardo Valverde (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). The Chronicles was a finalist for the Latino International Book Award for Best Poetry Book in English in 2016.
García has published poetry, fiction and scholarly work in a variety of journals, anthologies and museum catalogs. His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry anthology, The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of US-Hispanic Literature, The American Journal of Poetry, Los Angeles Review, and Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. He has contributed to the art work and projects of various visual artists, including Berta Jottar, Harry Gamboa Jr., Susan Silton, David John Attyah, and Sandra de la Loza.
Ramón García was born in Colima, Mexico and grew up in Modesto, California. He has a B.A. in World Literature from University of California, Santa Cruz and a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego. He is a Professor at California State University, Northridge and lives in downtown Los Angeles.
About The Chronicles
“Ramón García’s The Chronicles is wondrously deceptive. At first we may think we know the folkloric stuff dreams are made of, but soon one is inside a unique world where, through language and ritual, an edgy authority speaks through metaphor, chronicling the underbelly of the spoken and unspoken, and at times even the unspeakable. The Chronicles unearths things we didn’t know we knew—surprising, new, clear-eyed twists and turns. This collection of urgent poems, partly woven from stories inherited, sings through the past to the present and future.”—Yusef Komunyakaa

Second Tuesday Poetry Reading with Molly Fisk & Ingrid Keriotis
2023-08-08 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
Please join us for a poetry reading featuring Molly Fisk and Ingrid Keriotis with an open mic to follow.
RSVP with the link below.

You are invited to a Zoom meeting.
When: Aug 8, 2023 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIud-yorzMjG9Nu0FHzh0Uy7TVpsE81x9PiAfter registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Chloe Martinez and Emma Trelles
2023-09-12 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
Hosted by Stella Beratlis
Date: Tuesday, September 12, 2023
Time: 7:00 pm PST
RSVP for Zoom link
Open mic signup; 3 mins per reader please.
Please join us this month as we feature poets Emma Trelles and Chloe Martinez on Zoom. Emma Trelles, author of Tropicalia, is the immediate past poet laureate for Santa Barbara, a CantoMundo fellow and Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow. Chloe Martinez, author of Ten Thousand Selves, is a scholar and poet who also serves as associate director of programming at the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at Claremont McKenna College. Her poems and translations have been widely published and have received numerous awards and honors.
Chloe Martinez
Chloe Martinez is a scholar of South Asian religions and a poet. She lives in Claremont, CA with her husband and two daughters. She is the Associate Director of Programming at the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at Claremont McKenna College, as well as Lecturer in CMC’s Department of Religious Studies.
She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she was a Mellon Mays Fellow, and received the MA/PhD in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching interests include creative writing; religions of South Asia; medieval North Indian devotional movements; poetry and autobiography in South Asia; and South Asian American religious worlds. Her research has appeared in journals including The Medieval History Journal and South Asia​, and has been funded by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, AIIS, and SSRC-Mellon Mays.
She is also a graduate of Boston University’s Creative Writing MA and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Holden Scholar. The author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works, 2021) and chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020), her poems and translations have appeared in Ploughshares, POETRY, The Common, AGNI, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere, and have been nominated multiple times for a Pushcart Prize, as well as for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. Her translations have won the Robert Fitzgerald Prize and the Anne Frydman Prize. She is a visiting editor at Beloit Poetry Journal and the poetry editor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.
See more at www.chloeAVmartinez.com
About The Ten Thousand Selves

“Martinez understands the power of story to transmute experience into knowledge, and the power of poetry to question story’s power. Her scope is global, her vision historical, and her voice—by turns tender, sardonic, full of rage or humbled awe—is eloquently contemporary. Here is a book that presses back against reality. ‘Not a story, not an image. It is a map.'” —Suzanne Buffam, author of A Pillow Book
“…the selves in these beautifully wrought poems are wide-eyed in their wisdoms and whole-hearted in their songs. In poem after poem, they show the myriad possibilities in our extraordinary and surprising lives.” –Adrian Matejka, author of Somebody Else Sold the World

Second Tuesday Reading Series with Brynn Saito and Cristina Sandoval
2023-10-10 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
Join us for this reading with Brynn Saito and Cristina Sandoval.

Brynn Saito’s third book of poems, Under a Future Sky, was published in August 2023 by Red Hen Press. A 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow, Brynn is the recipient of the Benjamin Saltman Award, and her poems have appeared in the New York Times and American Poetry Review. Brynn lives in the traditional homelands of the Yokuts and Mono peoples (aka, Fresno, CA) where she teaches in the MFA program at Fresno State. She’s co-editing with Brandon Shimoda an anthology of poetry written by descendants of the Japanese American / Nikkei incarceration, forthcoming in 2025 from Haymarket Books.

Cristina Sandoval is a recent graduate of the Fresno State MFA program, and a resident of Modesto, CA.

Register here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAkdOupqTkvH9bNir_T5d69J9taVP3SkR4P

You’ll receive a confirmation email with the Zoom link for the evening.

Second Tuesday featuring Melchor Sahagun & Tina Marie Curiel-Vega
2023-11-14 19:00 - 20:30 | Intermission at the State Theater Modesto CA, 1307 J Street, Modesto, 95354, United States
We’re super excited to invite everyone to November’s Second Tuesday reading at the Intermission in downtown Modesto. Not only do we get to experience poetry in an amazing new space in our community, but also we celebrate Sorry I’m Late, the first collection from Stockton poet Melchor Sahagun, erstwhile and beloved Queen Bean Poetry Night host. Joining him as featured poet is author and activist Tina Marie Curiel-Vega, cofounder of the existir collective whose most recent zine Trying to Fix Destiny just came out. Stay for the open mic following the featured readers.

MELCHOR SAHAGUN – Melchor Sahagun is a human being from the human city of Stockton, CA, who has spent most of the last three decades writing, singing, joking, rapping, acting, and otherwise participating in various human endeavors.

He’s spent his human years as a poet, musician, author, comedian, playwright , performer, and skateboarder; mentoring other humans in the written and performing arts, coaching slam teams, hosting events, and advocating for the arts in the greater human community– a group he connects with through several forms of human interaction.

Though he’s been writing poems for nearly thirty years, Sorry I’m Late is his first collection. He apologizes for the wait.

TINA MARIE CURIEL-VEGA – Tina Curiel is a Xicana and Boricua almost-native Central Valley poet and artivist currently living in Modesto, California with her three cats and as many books and records as possible. Her poetry explores her family history, dealings with incarceration and the criminal legal system, activism, addiction, and hope.

Both authors will have copies of their pubs for sale. Hoping you can join us to bless these new books of poetry and share ALL the poetry love.

MoSt Member Open Mic on December 14
2023-12-14 18:00 - 20:00 | The Dragonfly Art for Life, 1210 J Street, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
MoSt Poetry members are cordially invited to read at this special open mic poetry reading on Thursday, December 14th at The Dragonfly Art for Life, 1210 J Street in downtown Modesto, CA. Free and open to the public, the event starts at 6:00 p.m. If you haven’t yet become a MoSt member and would like to help support poetry in Stanislaus County, please go to mostpoetry.org.

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Luke Johnson and Mariah Bosch
2024-01-09 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Luke Johnson, author of Quiver, and Mariah Bosch, Fresno State MFA graduate. Hosted by Stella Beratlis
Date: Tuesday, January 9, 2024
Time: 7:00 pm PST on Zoom–RSVP required. https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEqce6uqTwqHtFdKlW9fo8M7VcNJLdy8ref. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet): https://forms.gle/RnPGLFptHija15RU8

LUKE JOHNSON
Luke Johnson is the author of Quiver (Texas Review Press), a finalist for The Jake Adam York Prize, The Levis Award, The Vassar Miller Prize and the Brittingham. His second book A Slow Indwelling, a call and response with the poet Megan Merchant, is forthcoming from Harbor Editions Fall 2024. You can find more of his work at Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. Connect on Twitter at @Lukesrant or through email: writerswharfmb@gmail.com

About Quiver
“Quiver is the most visceral, haunting book of poems I have read in years. Johnson reimagines masculinity and is unafraid to unearth its dark elements, as father, son, and witness to the brutality and beauty in and around us. He writes, ‘Listen: When/I said boys have a storm inside,/this itch that fills our teeth, I/was sharing in secret. I meant/we have mothers who gift us ghosts,/our heads upon a trigger.’ This searing debut is a world of its own, built with fearlessness, tenderness, and grace. Take notice. Luke Johnson has arrived.” —Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate
“In Quiver, Luke Johnson’s unforgettable debut poetry collection, he invokes The Old Testament, its fires, floods, and prophecies—to reckon with ‘all the ways a child drowns, like spiders trapped in spit.’ These are harrowing poems. Yet, at the heart of Johnson’s unsparing gaze lies enormous compassion—for the ghosts that haunt him, for the child self who carried ‘scars without witness.’ Quiver is a work of glorious complexity—brutal, lyrical, shot through with images that stop you in your tracks. But more than that, these poems look deeply at the ways the sins of the father are visited on successive generations and move toward breaking the cycle.” —Ellen Bass — Ellen Bass

MARIAH BOSCH

Mariah Bosch (she/they) is a queer Chicana poet and visual artist from Fresno, CA. She is a graduate of Fresno State’s MFA program in poetry. Her work can be found on Poets.org, Small Press Traffic, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere.

MoSt Second Tuesday Poetry Reading featuring Angela Drew & Linda Scheller
2024-02-13 19:00 - 20:00 | Prospect Theater Project, 1214 K Street, Modesto, CA, United States
Please join us Tuesday, February 13th, 2024 at 7:00 p.m. PST for a poetry reading featuring Angela Drew and Linda Scheller at Prospect Theater Project’s Artist Lab, 1214 K Street, Modesto CA. Hosted by Gillian Wegener, this free event will include an open mic.
Angela Mason-Drew is a mother, dancer, poet, spoken word performer and self-proclaimed linguistic artist who has loved the rhythm and sounds of words for as long as she can remember. Born in Berkeley, CA, she began writing at age 8 and has always understood that words have the power to soothe, stir, or solidify connection. Her lifelong love affair with storytelling began in the sandbox of her childhood playground and she has played with the magic of words ever since. Angela is a graduate of Holy Names University in Oakland, CA, where she graduated magna cum laude. She is a proud Bay Area native and shares stories from her current home in the Central Valley. To learn more about Angela and her word artistry, visit her on Instagram @she_spits_fire Facebook @Angela Drew (Angela Mason) and online at www.elderberrywine.org.

Linda Scheller is the author of two books of poetry, Fierce Light (FutureCycle Press) and Wind & Children (Main Street Rag Publishing Company). Her poetry, plays, and book reviews are published in numerous journals and anthologies including Hawai’i Pacific Review, Poem, Sugar House Review, Slipstream, and Colorado Review. Recent honors include Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations, and her manuscript Laurels was a finalist for the 2023 Aryamati Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Concrete Wolf Louis Poetry Book Award. Ms. Scheller is a retired educator who volunteers as a programmer for KCBP Community Radio. For more information, please go to her website, lindascheller.com.

Ekphrasis: Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Rhony Bhopla and Lynn Hansen
2024-03-12 19:00 - 20:30 | Prospect Theater Project, 1214 K Street, Modesto, CA, United States
Ekphrastic poetry has come to be defined as poems written about works of art; however, in ancient Greece, the term ekphrasis was applied to the skill of describing a thing with vivid detail. —Getty Museum
We invite you to join the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center at Second Tuesday Poetry as we feature visual artist/poet Rhony Bhopla and Lynn Hansen of Modesto. Both poets will share their poems accompanied by images. With open mic following featured poets. Hosted by Stella Beratlis.
Date: Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Place: Artist Lab, Prospect Theater Project, 1214 K Street, Modesto, 95354
Open mic sign-up form (3 min per poet): https://forms.gle/RnPGLFptHija15RU8

RHONY BHOPLA

Rhony Bhopla is a poet and visual artist whose poems and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in PRISM International, The Hopper, Notre Dame Review, Cherry Moon: Emerging Voices from the Asian Diaspora, Northwest Review, and Harvard Review. She is a member of the Mapmakers Alumni Institute, and holds a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Pacific University.

LYNN HANSEN

Lynn M. Hansen is Faculty Emerita from Modesto Junior College Biological Sciences and a member of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and the National League of American Pen Women, Modesto Branch. A new collection of travel poems, In the Presence of the Moai: Poetry and Prose of Travel, was published in November 2023. In addition to her other poetry collections, Flicker and The Journey to Sky Avenue, she has written an historical novel about the life of her grandmother.

Bloom Where Planted: Four Central Valley Poets for National Poetry Month
2024-04-09 19:00 - 20:30 | The Artist Lab at Prospect Theater Project, 1214 K Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
Join us for our next Second Tuesday Poetry on April 9, 2024, as we present four Central Valley poets to help us honor National Poetry Month.
Featuring Kristy Lauron, Elizabeth Sousa, Jazmarie LaTour, and Kevin Walton with open mic following featured poets.
When: Tuesday, April 9, 2024 at 7:00 p.m.
Where: The Artist Lab at Prospect Theater Project, 1218 K Street, Modesto CA 95354. Plenty of street parking, free! We are also welcome to park across the street at the Stanislaus County Law Library.
Open Mic Sign-up: https://forms.gle/rcwsEcyk7paszWk27(4 mins per poet or 2 pieces, whichever is shorter)
Our Featured Poets
Kristy Lauron
My name is Kristy Lauron and I am a published poet. I was born and raised in Stockton and have been immersed in the arts since childhood. I believe art is necessary for healing and sharing of our human existence. My poetry is a reflection of my self journey, offering insights to my trials and tribulations, all wrapped up in love.
Jazmarie LaTour
Jazmarie is the Poet Laureate of her hometown Stockton, Ca. She is an artisan, healer, mediation leader, and dreamer who uses writing to attune to the frequency and deep call of the Earth, her Ancestors, and the Great Spirit that leads her. Her love for spoken word performance has given her the courage to speak from her heart to anyone who will listen. Her love for the written word has given her the courage to allow others to hold a piece of her heart right in their hands. She is the author of the collection The Nature of Her, which can be ordered from the thenatureofher.com.
Elizabeth Sousa
Elizabeth Sousa is a poet from Turlock, a Type One Diabetes advocate, and an aspiring badass. She was co-organizer of the 2016 Writers Resist reading at the Prospect Theater Project, and she has performed her pieces on stages throughout the Central Valley.
Kevin Walton
Kevin is a poet and raconteur who founded a Facebook group, To the Prose Pros, a space where he shares his work and offers a forum for others to contribute. He lives in Modesto with his wife, artist Traci Bookman.
