Second Tuesday Poetry featuring 2023 Sixteen Rivers Press authors Matthew M. Monte & Joseph Zaccardi
2023-04-11 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
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 Bryan Medina, Joseph Rios, Michael Meyerhofer, and Kenneth Chacón
2023-05-09 19:00 - 20:00
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Four Fresno Poets: Bryan Medina, Joseph Rios, Michael Meyerhofer, and Kenneth Chacón.
Hosted by Gillian Wegener
Date: Tuesday, May 9, 2022
Time: 7:00 pm PDT
on Zoom–RSVP required:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAuceuuqDIjG9D7nH7UsdTrO5qDQlW6f7Lp
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Bryan Medina
Bryan Medina has been a fixture in the Fresno literary community for over 25 years. A former student of California Poet Laureate Emeritus Juan Felipe Herrera, his poetry has graced stages in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Kansas City. He founded the Inner Ear Poetry Slam as a way to free poetry from the confines of academic institutions, making it accessible to all. Bryan has been awarded two City of Fresno Commendations for contributions to Fresno’s rich artistic and cultural heritage and has been featured as one of the four “Fresno Poets” from writer Nick Belardes’s Distinguished Valley Writers series as well as appeared in journals such as Poetry, Flies, Cockroaches, and Poets, In The Grove, The San Joaquin Review, Jubilee, and Invisible Memoirs and was an Honorable Mention in the ‘06 Larry Levis Poetry Prize. He is a graduate of Fresno Pacific University and teaches Special Education.
Joseph Rios
Born in Clovis, Joseph Rios is the author of Shadowboxing: Poems and Impersonations (Omnidawn), winner of the American Book Award; he was named one of the Notable Debut Poets by Poets & Writers Magazine for 2017. His poems can be found at Poem A Day, Huizache, The Rumpus, the San Francisco Chronicle, and on Metro buses and trains in Los Angeles. He was recently named a Stegner Fellow by Stanford University. He lives in Fresno.
Michael Meyerhofer
Michael Meyerhofer’s fifth book, Ragged Eden, was published by Glass Lyre Press. He has been the startled recipient of fourteen national writing awards including the James Wright Poetry Award, the Liam Rector First Book Award, the Brick Road Poetry Book Prize, and several chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry, Rattle, Brevity, Ploughshares, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and other journals. He is also the author of a fantasy series.
Kennth Chacón
Kenneth Chacón is the author of The Cholo Who Said Nothing & Other Poems(Turning Point, 2017). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Colorado Review, Cimarron Review, Palette Poetry, Blackbird, and Huizache among others. Chacón is a native of Fresno, California and teaches English at Fresno City College.

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Lynn Hansen, Richard Robbins, and Thomas Mitchell
2023-06-13 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
Join the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center as we present poets Lynn Hansen, Richard Robbins, and Thomas Mitchell in a free on-line poetry reading hosted by Gillian Wegener.

ABOUT LYNN HANSEN
Lynn M. Hansen is a retired Modesto Junior College professor of marine biology. A member of the Ina Coolbrith Circle, Orinda, CA; MoSt Poetry Center, Modesto; and National League of American Pen Women, her work reflects her sense of place and the art of storytelling. In 2013 a collection of her poems was published by Quercus Review Press entitled Flicker: Poems. She is currently writing an historical novel about her maternal grandmother, Mernie Daisy Lewis, 1882-1963.

ABOUT RICHARD ROBBINS
Richard Robbins was raised in California and Montana, taught in Minnesota for many years, and recently moved back west to Oregon. Robbins has received awards or residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the Anderson Center, Willapa Bay AiR, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers. From 1986 to 2014, he directed the Good Thunder Reading Series at Minnesota State Mankato, which the Minnesota Humanities Commission called, “the premier small-town reading series in the country.”
“Part balm, part prayer, part revelation, the quietly moving and incantatory poems in Richard Robbins’s The Oratory of All Souls reveal a poetic voice that is masterful, adept, and profoundly compelling. These supple poems unfold seamlessly, with the muscular music of moving water: elegant, clear, fierce. Robbins has the gaze of a painter, with a gorgeous insistence on image, line, shadow, and light.” —Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of tsunami vs. the fukushima 50

ABOUT THOMAS MITCHELL
Thomas Mitchell is a shrewd and trusted observer of the natural world. In this third book, Where We Arrive, Mitchell listens to “the counsel of water” and moves “from one silence to another.” And as such, he spies “a red-tailed hawk drifting in absolute loneliness.” More often than not, Mitchell is a poet of intimate feelings. He remarks time and again upon various stars and moons, towhees and starlings. His poetry is a poetry bent on reimagining the world.
—Thomas Aslin, author of Salvage and A Moon Over Wings

You are invited to a Zoom meeting.
When: Jun 13, 2023 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUqcuqvrDkrHN0lTrVUQlB77MvaiI83W4zMAfter registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Aideed Medina and Ramón García
2023-07-11 19:00 - 20:00
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.

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Fresno poets Michael Meyerhofer and Angela Chaidez Vincent
2024-05-14 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
MoSt Poetry welcomes featured poets Michael Meyerhofer and Angela Chaidez Vincent for its May Second Tuesday Poetry series–this month at Bookish–Modesto’s very own, very new, and very exciting bookstore!
Where: Bookish Bookstore, 811 W. Roseburg Avenue, Modesto CA 95350
When: Tuesday, May 14, 2024 at 7:00 pm
Hosted by Modesto poet laureate emeritus Gillian Wegener; open mic follows featured poets. Please sign up at event.
Michael Meyerhofer

Michael Meyerhofer is the author of five books of poetry—including What To Do If You’re Buried Alive (free from Doubleback Books). His work has appeared in The Sun, Missouri Review, Southern Review, Brevity, Rattle, and other journals. He’s also the author of a fantasy series and Poetry Editor of Atticus Review. For more info and an embarrassing childhood photo, visit troublewithhammers.com.
About WHAT TO DO IF YOU’RE BURIED ALIVE
The poems in What To Do If You’re Buried Alive are tenderly masculine, self-deprecating and humorous. They are the poems of an adult male poet looking back at childhood and puberty with anything but rose-colored glasses. He shows us how we see ourselves often through time—with a mixture of cringe and understanding.
Mary Biddinger, author of A Sunny Place with Adequate Water, writes, “With a compassionate eye, and his trademark sense of humor that hooks readers from the very first page, Meyerhofer sends us back to our earliest memories, and shows us a world of heartbreak and wonder.” And Jon Tribble, author of Natural State, adds “Through pain and loss, Meyerhofer’s poems are harrowing prayers searching for ‘the charms of language’ that might lead to forgiveness, to redemption, to love.”
Angela Chaidez Vincent
Image credit: © Adrianne Mathiowetz Photography
Angela Chaidez Vincent writes poetry and fiction and has a background of livelihoods in engineering, mathematics, and programming. Her debut poetry collection ARENA GLOW (April 2024, Tourane Press) features poems about women with a daredevil oblique. Angela’s work has appeared in Oxford Review of Books, North American Review, 32 Poems, Atticus Review, and Bellevue Literary Review, among others. She lives in Fresno, California and is online at angelachaidezvincent.com.

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Susan Cohen & Lenore Weiss
2024-08-13 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is proud to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Susan Cohen & Lenore Weiss
Date: Tuesday, August 13, 2024
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg, Modesto CA 95350 (Roseburg Square Shopping Center)
Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event.

Susan Cohen
Susan Cohen’s third collection, Democracy of Fire (Broadstone Books: 2022), was praised by Ellen Bass as a “wise and wonderful” vision of “our interconnectedness.” Her poetry honors include the Red Wheelbarrow Prize judged by Mark Doty, the Terrain Annual Poetry Prize judged by Arthur Sze, and a special mention in Pushcart Prize XLIII. A former journalist and contributing writer for the Washington Post Magazine, she lives in Berkeley and has appeared in 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Verse Daily, and many anthologies.
Praise for Susan Cohen & 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
At this historical, political and ecological moment, with democracy and our earth aflame, could there be a more timely or relevant collection than Susan Cohen’s powerful, wise and deeply humane book of poetry, Democracy of Fire? Here, the many losses we experience both daily and across time—losses both cultural and personal—are mitigated by the act of memory and a faith in, well, the facts of our world and our capacity for intimate reckonings. Once again, Susan Cohen has shown herself to be one of the most compassionate recorders of our complicated times. —David St. John, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets & author of The Last Troubadour: Selected and New Poems
Lenore Weiss
Lenore’s past poetry collections form a trilogy about love, loss, and being mortal: Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island (West End Press, 2012); Two Places (Kelsay Books, 2014), and The Golem (Hakodesh Word Press, 2017). Her most recent collection, Video Game Pointers (WordTech Editions, 2024) issues a call for peace. Ethelzine published her hand-sewn poetry chapbook, From Malls to Museums. Alexandria Quarterly Press published her prize-winning flash fiction chapbook, Holding on to the Fringes of Love.
Lenore serves as the Associate Editor (Creative Nonfiction) for the Mud Season Review and lives in Oakland, California with Zebra the Brave and Granola the Shy. She earned an MFA in fiction from San Francisco State University. You may find her at www.lenoreweiss.com.

Praise for Lenore Weiss and Video Game Pointers
“This mighty collection features limbs of a radical mass autobiography. Our aggregate imagination wedded to virtuosic architecture of wordplay and image. Through these poems, quilted revolutionary legacies of resistance find their best song.”—Tongo Eisen-Martin, 8th Poet Laureate of San Francisco, California
“This generous volume stretches the expansive geography of the author’s imagination, time, space, experience and world view. Weiss is a practitioner of the politics of being fully alive.”—Maw Shein Win, Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn)

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Tom Myers and Stella Beratlis, with special guest Zoe Byron
2024-09-10 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Tom Myers and Stella Beratlis, with special guest Zoe Byron, Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate
Date: Tuesday, September 10, 2024
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg, Modesto CA 95350 (Roseburg Square Shopping Center)
Join us for this special reading to celebrate the release of Tom Myer’s first full poetry collection, Tremor in my Bones. Also featuring Stella Beratlis, author of Dust Bowl Venus. With special guest Zoe Byron, new Youth Poet Laureate for Stanislaus County.
Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event. Reading host: Gillian Wegener
Tom Myers
Tom Myers is a retired elementary school teacher and a founding board member of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center (MoSt). He enjoys the wilds of nature and a sense of place frames much of his poetry. His poems have been published in hardpan, Quercus Review, More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets, Collision II and VII, Homestead Review, Cosumnes River Journal, and Steam Ticket. He has four chapbooks. His first full-length book, A Tremor in my Bones, was just published in August.
Stella Beratlis
Stella Beratlis is the author of Dust Bowl Venus (2021) and Alkali Sink, both published by Sixteen Rivers Press. Alkali Sink was a 2016 nominee for the Northern California Book Award. Stella’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies as well as in the grand rotunda of the San Francisco Transbay Terminal, as part of a giant LED installation by artist Jenny Holzer. Stella was Modesto’s poet laureate from 2016-2020; is the coordinator of the Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate program, and works as a librarian at Modesto Junior College. She also collects typewriters, if you want to sell yours.
Zoe Byron
Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate Zoe Byron, a junior at Oakdale High School, was recently appointed to serve as the county’s second youth poet laureate. Zoe, whose parents are both English teachers, is a confirmed poetry fanatic whose initial exposure to performance poetry (thanks, Mom!) during the pandemic sparked a curiosity for and love of the form. Zoe’s early work was published in Oakdale Junior High’s annual poetry anthology; more recently, her work appeared in Penumbra, the Stan State literary journal. Zoe is also a regular participant in the Stanislaus County Poetry Out Loud competition.

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Patricia Caspers & Molly Fisk
2024-10-08 19:00 - 20:30 | The Artist Lab at Prospect Theater Project, 1214 K Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Patricia Caspers and Molly Fisk
Date: Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Artist Lab at the Prospect Theater Project, 1214 K Street, Modesto CA 95354
Join us for this special reading featuring Patricia Caspers and Molly Fisk, both of Nevada City. Patricia’s collection The Most Kissed Woman in the World was published by Kelsay Books earlier this year; she is the editor of the poetry journal West Trestle Review. Molly Fisk is the poet laureate of Nevada City and received a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets to create the anthology California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology. Her new collection, Walking Wheel, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2026.
Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event. Hosted by Gillian Wegener
Patricia Caspers
Patricia Caspers is an award-winning writer and the founder/publisher of West Trestle Review. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections: The Most Kissed Woman in the World (Kelsay Books, 2024), Some Flawed Magic (Kelsay Books, 2021), and In the Belly of the Albatross (Glass Lyre Press, 2015). She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, and her work has appeared widely in journals such as Ploughshares, Malahat Review, and Sugar House Review.
About The Most Kissed Woman in the World:
“There is so much beauty in Patricia Caspers’ The Most Kissed Woman in the World, and a lot of darkness, too. In each “Portrait of God” Caspers finds the sacred somewhere unexpected: a pungent ginkgo tree; an assisted living facility; a dysfunctional family; the self in all its gorgeous imperfections. These lyrical, surprising poems look at the world with hard-won clarity and tenderness, embracing joy without turning away from suffering. “God is the kitchen knife that misses,” Caspers writes, as well as “the crash of abundance.” Exactly. The Most Kissed Woman is sharp and generous and wise, reminding us where we hurt and also, in its revelatory unfoldings, why we go on.” –Chloe Martinez, author of Ten Thousand Selves

Molly Fisk

Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, her new collection Walking Wheel is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2026. Fisk, who lives in the Sierra foothills, has also won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She was the inaugural poet laureate of Nevada County and is current poet laureate of both KVMR-FM, Nevada City and Hell’s Backbone Grill in Boulder, UT.

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring John Shoptaw and Murray Silverstein
2024-11-12 19:00 - 20:30 | The Artist Lab at Prospect Theater Project, 1214 K Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is excited to present Second Tuesday Poetry with featured poets Murray Silverstein and John Shoptaw.
Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Artist Lab at the Prospect Theater Project, 1214 K Street, Modesto CA 95354
Join us at this reading featuring noted East Bay poets John Shoptaw and Murray Silverstein, with open mic following our guest poets. Featured poets will be reading from their new collections, which will be available for purchase and signing.
Murray Silverstein
Red Studio is Murray Silverstein’s third book of poems. His first collection, Any Old Wolf (2007), was the winner of the Independent Publisher’s Bronze Medal for Poetry and was followed by Master of Leaves (2014). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Rattle, ZYZZYVA, The MacGuffin, The Brooklyn Review, West Marin Review, Plainsongs, Nimrod, The Dreaming Machine, and Spillway.
The senior editor for two Sixteen Rivers anthologies, America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (2018), which received the Independent Publisher’s Silver Medal for anthologies, and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (2010), he also directs the Sixteen Rivers Press Youth Poetry Project, which has published three chapbooks by teen poets: Anthems (2022), Dear Earth (2023), and Our Own Light (2024). A practicing architect for forty years and coauthor of four books on architecture, including A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press) and Patterns of Home (The Taunton Press), Silverstein lives in Oakland, California.
John Shoptaw
John Shoptaw, a leading voice in ecopoetics, is widely published in literary journals and magazines, including Arion, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and Poetry. His first poetry collection, Times Beach (2015), won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Shoptaw is the author of On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry, the libretto for Eric Sawyer’s opera Our American Cousin (Boston Modern Orchestra Project), and a number of essays on poetry and poetics, including “Why Ecopoetry?” (Poetry). He teaches in the UC Berkeley English Department.
From the Foreword to Near Earth Objects, by Jenny O’Dell:
In Near-Earth Object, Shoptaw explores the interactions, sometimes dark and sometimes joyful, between humans and the non-human natural world. Resisting the human exceptionalism that in its many forms can block imaginative access to the world, Shoptaw entertains the perspectives of a host of others: a cricket, a bat, a nuthatch, a carnival bear, a tree’s shade, cherubim, an asteroid, and Earth herself.
Patrick Davis, publisher at Unbound Edition Press, said, “John’s remarkable work is formally attuned, entirely accessible, and urgently relevant. His ecopoetics, on full display in Near-Earth Object, propel a vital voice for our challenging times.”

Second Tuesday: Members' Holiday Open Mic & Potluck
2024-12-10 18:00 - 19:30 | The Dragonfly Art for Life, 1210 J Street, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday: Members’ Holiday Open Mic and Potluck. Bring a dish to share, and help us celebrate 15 years of bringing poetry to the community through our Second Tuesday series. If you’re not a MoSt member yet, you are warmly encouraged to attend and join us at the door.
On Tuesday, December 10 at the Dragonfly Art for Life, 1210 J Street, Modesto CA 95354.
MoSt Poetry is proud to serve our community with free poetry events, including the Second Tuesday Poetry series, Poetry on Saturdays at the Carnegie Arts Center, Free Summer Poetry Workshops at the Library, New Year’s Poetry Challenge, Poetry Everywhere initiative at Stanislaus County K-12 public schools, and more. Programs we administer or in which we partner include Poetry Out Loud, Aileen Jaffa Youth Poetry Contest, Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate, and the City of Modesto’s Poets’ Corner Contest.
On Facebook, Instagram, and Threads: @mostpoetry.

Second Tuesday Feb. 11: Joseph Rios & Vielka Solano
2025-02-11 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Vielka Solano and Joseph Rios
Date: Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Orangeburg Ave, in the Roseburg Square shopping center
Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event. Hosted by Gillian Wegener.

Vielka Solano
Born in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, Vielka Solano obtained her Doctor of Medicine degree from the Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo. After immigrating to Modesto, California, Vielka started working for Golden Valley Health Centers, providing healthcare to the underserved, rural community of Patterson, California. Professionally and as a poet, Vielka’s work focuses on social injustice, the trauma of war, and domestic violence. She is the founder of “Poesia y Arte Curando el Alma,” an outreach program designed to give those who have suffered domestic violence a voice through the arts. She is the founder of Noche de Poesia and host of Grito de Mujer in Modesto. In 2019, Vielka was among the recipients of the Outstanding Woman of the Year award from the Stanislaus County Commission for Women, and has also received the Concilio Unsung Hero Award. Vielka is part of Influencers4Justice, a program funded by Blue Shield of California Foundation.
Joseph Rios
Joseph Rios headshot
Joseph Rios was born in the San Joaquin Valley in 1987. He is a Xicano writer and the author of Shadowboxing: Poems & Impersonations (Omnidawn, 2017), winner of a 2018 American Book Award. A Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, Rios is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from Community of Writers, CantoMundo, Letras Latinas, and the California Arts Council. Rios lives on Yokuts land in Fresno, California, where he served as poet laureate from 2022-2024. In 2024, he received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. He is the founder of Doña Helen’s, a poet’s residency at his grandparents’ longtime home in the San Joaquin Valley.
As an exuberant collection of relentless declamations against the existing economic order, “Shadowboxing” contains fresh poems of elemental protest, open reflections on politically motivated murders and disappearances, and lyric proclamations praising the inherent superiority of collective identity over the relic of the personal. —Sonja James, The Journal

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Bob Stanley and Dane Cervine with Open Mic
2025-03-11 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Bob Stanley and Dane Cervine.
Date: Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Orangeburg Ave, in the Roseburg Square shopping center
Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event. Hosted by Modesto poet laureate emeritus & author Gillian Wegener.

BOB STANLEY
Bob Stanley studied poetry at Caltech and UCLA, and he taught English and Creative Writing at Solano College, Sac City College, and Sac State before retiring in 2021. Sacramento’s Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2012, Bob has organized poetry events in California for many years. His collections include Walt Whitman Orders a Cheeseburger (2009), Miracle Shine (2013), and Language Barrier (2024). Bob and his wife Joyce live in Sacramento and organize online poetry seminars that help support nonprofit organizations.
Bob’s most recent collection, Language Barrier, which is published by CW Books, is available on the Random Lane Press website: randomlanepress.com
ABOUT LANGUAGE BARRIER
“Language is no barrier to our enjoyment of the experiences Bob Stanley has distilled and decanted in these poems. His keen eye for detail takes us first on a passionate tour of China and then on a reminiscent journey through America, described through the prism of many poetic forms. As he says, ‘I could write with both care and abandon,’ and he has done just that. Here you will find tragedies in miniature, but also wonder at nature and the past. Through it all runs Stanley’s raconteurial charm, a Poundian respect for the world of the senses, and a tireless yearning for song: ‘keep the discord in the chord, / sing what’s hard to sound soft.’ The result, in Stanley’s own words, is ‘peach-perfect.’”—Brad Buchanan

DANE CERVINE
Dane Cervine’s recent books of poetry include DEEP TRAVEL – At Home in the [Burning] World (Saddle Road Press), The World Is God’s Language (Sixteen Rivers Press), Earth Is a Fickle Dancer (Main Street Rag), and The Gateless Gate – Polishing the Moon Sword (Saddle Road Press). Dane’s poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, the Atlanta Review, Caesura, and been nominated for multiple Pushcarts. His work appears in The SUN, the Hudson Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Sycamore Review, Pedestal Magazine, among others. Dane lives in Santa Cruz, California. Visit his website at: https://danecervine.typepad.com/
ABOUT DEEP TRAVEL
“I love the way [Dane has] taken the haibun back to its origins with Bashō—what a brilliant and perfectly executed form for [his] observations and musings. It’s such a rich book. Some of [the] haiku are so beautifully apt, little marvels, and one of my favorites is the one inspired by Ocean Vuong:
I am a book—of bone,
raft and river
That seems to me emblematic of the entire book and [Dane’s] intents—to offer insights and responses without any trace of self-importance, and then to return to shore. –Lynne Knight

Second Tuesday Poetry with Soul Vang and Gary Thomas
2025-04-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Gary Thomas & Soul Vang
Date: Tuesday, April 8, 2025
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Orangeburg Ave, in the Roseburg Square shopping center
Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event. Hosted by Gillian Wegener
SOUL VANG
Soul Vang is the author of three collections of poetry: Of Tigers and Wars (Sahtu Press, 2024); Song of the Cluster Bomblet (HER Publisher, 2024); and To Live Here (Imaginary Friend Press, 2014).
Poet, educator, and U.S. Army veteran, Vang received his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from California State University, Fresno, and is an editorial member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle (HAWC).
Vang’s writing has appeared in Academy of American Poets (poets.org), Water~Stone Review, Abernathy Magazine, Asian American Literary Review, Fiction Attic Press, In the Grove, The Packinghouse Review, Southeast Asia Globe, and The New York Times, among others.
His awards and honors include the 2014 Imaginary Friend Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Horizon Artist Award from the Fresno Arts Council.
About TO LIVE HERE
To Live Here is a triumph: a pure and graceful portrait of the poet from Sky Mountain and the Dragon River, as a young man in the United States Army, and as a parent and poet in Fresno. Part emotional cartography and pure mastery of the craft, this vital glimpse into the Hmong American experience is a heart, a history, and a gift of hard-earned wisdom. Each poem is an artifact, a piece of art, and an important addition to American literature. This is poetry built to last. You will not forget it. –Lee Herrick, Fresno Poet Laureate
GARY THOMAS
Gary Thomas grew up on a peach farm outside Empire, California. Prior to retirement, he taught eighth grade language arts for thirty-one years and junior college English for seven. His poems have been published in The Comstock Review, MockingHeart Review, Atticus Review, River Heron Review, Barzakh, Blue Heron Review, Split Rock Review, Book of Matches, and Hole in the Head Review, among others, in the anthology More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets, and in Tule Review 2024. He is a founding member of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center (MoSt) and of the Stanislaus County writing group known as The Licensed Fools. A full-length collection, All the Connecting Lights, was released in August 2022 from Finishing Line Press. His latest poetry collection, O Yes We Breathe, was published in November 2024 by Manzanita Writers Press.
ABOUT O YES WE BREATHE:
In his new collection, O Yes We Breathe, Gary Thomas seamlessly weaves days-gone-by boyhood pastoral with the post-pandemic political and spiritual present. Moving between poems, I was transfixed by the gentle music within these pages. “I am beholden to beauty that breathes any way it can-” As inhale, Thomas’ keen eye for detail sharpens the blade of these poems on the sandstone grit of his father’s lessons on life. As exhale, Thomas delivers poignant and tender incantations summoning the deeper, higher self. “If all we ever have is what we trade invisibly in our hulls of flesh and fluidity, we can learn to care for what we have. We can partake our full portion as family. We can breathe easy.” Each poem is a circle within itself “still working with some astonishment,” rippling outward, a whole world. This collection: “Let it light the corners.”
-Kai Coggin, Poet Laureate of Hot Springs, Arkansas, author of Mother of Other Kingdoms and Mining for Stardust

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Tama Brisbane & Rosa Lane
2025-05-13 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Rosa Lane (Maine, East Bay) & Tama Brisbane (Stockton)
Date: Tuesday, May 13, 2025
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Orangeburg Ave, in the Roseburg Square shopping center
Limited open mic; sign up at the event. Hosted by Gillian Wegener & Stella Beratlis

Rosa Lane
Rosa Lane, poet and architect, was found to be the youngest girl to have built a house. She was 11 years old when she built her 1st home, which is featured in a book entitled Making Ourselves at Home: Women Builders and Designers (Papier Mache Press, 1995). But Lane’s primary love is poetry. She is the author of four poetry collections: Called Back (Tupelo Press, 2024); Chouteau’s Chalk (University of Georgia Press, 2019); Tiller North (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2016); and Roots and Reckonings, a chapbook published by Granite Press East under a grant from the Maine Arts Commission.
Most recently, her work was selected as the Best of Poetry for the 2024 Geminga Prize, winner of the 2023 Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Award, runner-up for the 2023 River Heron Poetry Prize, and named finalist for the 2023 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition (Cork, Ireland) and the 2023 Australian Book Review‘s Peter Porter Prize (Melbourne) among other awards.
Lane’s latest poems have appeared in Catamaran, Crosswinds, Five Points, Nimrod, RHINO, River Heron Review, Southword, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She splits her time between the North Bay and coastal Maine, her native home where she lives with her wife. Website: www.rosalane.com

About CALLED BACK
“Rosa Lane’s Called Back breaks through the membrane that separates us from Dickinson’s time. Here, we enter Dickinson’s world brand new with the vigor of research re-imagined, obsession expressed with prolific inventiveness and mounting urgency, and language that astonishes in its apt, abundant, and irresistible embrace of sound. This is a book fearless in its approach and lavish in its accomplishment.”
– Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, author of The Promise of a Normal Life: A Novel

Tama Brisbane
TAMA L. BRISBANE is the City of Stockton’s Poet Laureate Emerita. She served four historic terms
from 2015-2023, presenting well over 300 times, including the inauguration of the city’s first Black
Mayor, Michael Tubbs. Her debut Laureate project helped engineer Stockton’s return to All-American
City status with an innovative spoken word presentation incorporating dozens of multigenerational,
multiethnic voices. Her performance as Guest Poet at The King Center and Ebenezer Baptist Church in
Atlanta led Martin Luther King III to say to her, “your words matter.” She remains in constant demand as
a keynote speaker and spoken word artist.
Tama is also President of With Our Words LLC, and a Program Director with Concrete Development Inc.
In her capacity as a literary and performing arts consultant, she develops curricula, programs, and events
across the United States and around the world. The impact of her words and her works have positively
shifted creative and cultural landscapes in Stockton and beyond.
“Mama T” is a published author, a Susan B. Anthony Award Winner for Creative Arts, a Black Women
Organized for Political Action Honoree, a University of the Pacific Woman of Distinction, an Action on
Behalf of Children Honoree, and a founding member of the National Black Poet Laureates Group. Her
tireless efforts on behalf of youth – particularly youth of color and from marginalized communities – have
been celebrated and recognized by both houses of the California Legislature, by the United States House
of Representatives, and the United States Senate.
Tama is grateful to her Creator for her earthly assignment. She takes inspiration and guidance from her
two favorite quotes. The first is from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “The salvation of humanity lies in the
hands of the creatively maladjusted.” The second is attributed to an Eastern proverb: “If you sit on the
bank of the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by.”

Second Tuesday Poetry with Aideed Medina and Russell Reza-Khaliq Gonzaga
2025-06-10 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Fresno’s newest Poet Laureate and spoken word artist Aideed Medina with Tracy poet, teacher, and spoken word artist Russell Reza-Khaliz Gonzaga

Date: Tuesday, June 10, 2025Time: 7:00 pm PSTWhere: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Orangeburg Ave, in the Roseburg Square shopping center

Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event. Hosted by Gillian Wegener

Russell Reza-Khaliq Gonzaga
Russell Reza-Khaliq Gonzaga has hosted and organized events and workshops including the Sierra Poetry Festival, the Center Camp Spoken Word Stage at Burning Man, and the weekly ELYSEUM Writers Workshops at Harbin Hot Springs. Russell is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Lake County (2012-2014) and has represented San Francisco for three years at the National Poetry Slam. As an Arts Educator, he has worked with several organizations including YouthSpeaks and WritersCorps. He is also the recipient of the Certificate of Honor from the Board of Supervisors and a Mayor’s declaration of “Russell Gonzaga Day” in San Francisco. Currently, Russell is Poetry Editor for The Fabulist, hosts the monthly Word Bubbles Open Mic in Tracy CA, and is caretaker for his beloved Auntie Rosie.

Aideed Medina

Aideed Medina is Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, award-winning spoken word artist and playwright, and is the author of 31 Hummingbird: A Suite of Poems (Editorial Xingao, 2023) and Segmented Bodies (Prickly Pear Press, 2024). Her poetry and prose have been featured in many publications, including Fresno State’s Club Austral Literary Magazine, Chicano Writers and Artists Association Journal, La Bloga, Poets Responding, Split This Rock, and Nueva York Poetry Review, among many others, as well as in compositions for the 559 Mural Project and Fresno Grand Opera’s Opera Remix. Aideed is also a California Naturalist, and practices “flor y canto” as part of her poetic process and exploration of California’s natural history. This past April, Aideed was appointed Fresno’s seventh poet laureate. She will serve through March 2027.

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Sherre Vernon and Paula Sheil
2025-07-08 19:00 | Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Sherre Vernon (Merced) and Paula Sheil (Stockton)
Date: Tuesday, July 8, 2025
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Orangeburg Ave, in the Roseburg Square shopping center
Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event. Hosted by Gillian Wegener
Paula Sheil
Paula Sheil is a Professor of English at San Joaquin Delta College. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts from Raymond College and a Master of Arts in Writing from New College of California. She founded, with friends, Tuleburg Press in 2012 and The Write Place in 2017.
She taught elementary education, moved on to arts administration, and then journalism before joining the faculty at Delta. In the 1990s, she ran an open mic that prompted her interest in publishing. She and the late Julia Holzer published ¡ZamBomba!, a poetry quarterly that was read from Seattle to San Diego, until 2000. At Delta, Sheil started the Writer’s Guild and Artifact, the college literary magazine.
Her work has been published in too many small journals, magazines, and newspapers to mention. She’s prouder yet of the poets and writers she has published and remains committed to empowering and amplifying the voices of Stockton and San Joaquin.
Sherre Vernon
Sherre Vernon (she/her/hers) is the award-winning author of Green Ink Wings, The Name is Perilous, and Flame Nebula, Bright Nova. Sherre has been published in journals such as Tahoma Literary Review and The Chestnut Review, nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, and anthologized in several collections including Fat & Queer and Best Small Fictions.
We welcome these poets, both new to the Second Tuesday series!

Second Tuesday Poetry: Modesto Poet Laureate Angela Drew + Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate Valentina Zeff
2025-08-12 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Modesto Poet Laureate Angela Drew with special guest Valentina Zeff, Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate
Date: Tuesday, August 12, 2025
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Orangeburg Ave, in the Roseburg Square shopping center
Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event. Hosted by Gillian Wegener
ANGELA DREW
Angela Drew is a mother, dancer, author, poet, and self-proclaimed linguistic artist who has loved the rhythm of words for as long as she can remember. Born in Berkeley, California, she began writing at age eight, and has always understood that words have the power to soothe, stir, or solidify connection. She has played with the magic of storytelling ever since. Angela is the winner and first-place slam champion of Modesto’s 2021 ILL List 16 Poetry Slam. She has performed her spoken word poetry at an array of venues, just to name a few: Yoshi’s Jazz Club, Oakland, California; Gallo Center for the Arts and the State Theater, Modesto, California; Brickhouse Art Gallery, Sacramento, California, and Apache Cafe, Atlanta, Georgia–a landmark poetry lounge that is home to some of Atlanta’s finest creatives.
She is the author of ElderBerry Wine, a children’s book written in poetic verse that celebrates the beauty and majesty of our elders, and the richness they bring by simply being a part of our lives. Join Angela on her poetic journey on all social media platforms. Her book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other booksellers.

VALENTINA ZEFF
Valentina Zeff is a sixteen-year-old poet from Modesto, California who is currently enrolled in the International Baccalaureate program at Modesto High School. Zeff has been writing free verse and ballad poetry since her freshman year of high school.
Zeff is active within her community and school through social and environmental activism, extracurricular projects, and volunteering. She was selected to be a member of the Park’s Youth Committee (April 2024-current), Modesto Youth Commission (October 2024-current), and student representative for Modesto High School’s Student Senate for both ninth and tenth grade. During the 2023-2024 Speech and Debate season, she was a top finalist for Original Spoken Word Poetry at State Qualifications. She is also the founder and Co-President of Modesto High School’s Book Club where she leads discussions on novels and poems of interest. Additionally, she is the Secretary and head layout editor/designer of the Panther Press, Modesto High School’s monthly newspaper.

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Samantha Tetangco Ocena and Moira Magneson
2025-09-09 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Samantha Tetangco Ocena and Moira Magneson, El Dorado County’s newest poet laureate
Date: Tuesday, Sep 9, 2025
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Orangeburg Ave, in the Roseburg Square shopping center
Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event. Hosted by Gillian Wegener
Samantha Tetangco Ocena
Samantha Tetangco Ocena is a Filipino-American writer and teacher. Her poetry collection, Hope You Blend In: Studies In Color & Light (Broadstone Books, 2024), was a finalist for the 2023 National Poetry Series. A multi-genre writer, her poetry, short stories, and creative nonfiction have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, most notably, The Sun, Tri-Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Zone 3, Gertrude, Foglifter, and Cimarron Review, among others. Sam has served as editor-in-chief for Blue Mesa Review, president of the AWP LGBTQ Writer’s Caucus, and was co-director of Plume: A Writer’s Companion, where she co-hosted Plume: A Writer’s Podcast. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico and is an Associate Teaching Professor at the University of California Merced.
ABOUT HOPE YOU BLEND IN: STUDIES IN COLOR & LIGHT
In this fierce debut, poet Samantha Tetangco wields “words like flint” to reveal the world we live in, from the apocalyptic world of California wildfires where “our backyards became / this hell / we have created” to the real world in which the queer brown body becomes “an open wound.” But these poems also remind us of the ordinary magic left to us: breathing in a lover’s scent, planting tulips, and even the beauty of weeds blossoming “so small & sweet / they always go unnamed.” Meticulously crafted and political in the best ways, this book brims with sharp beauty and reminds us what it is to be human.
–Lisa D. Chavez, author of In an Angry Season
​Samantha Tetangco’s gaze is so sharp in this collection of poems, that a single shift in tense can pierce a hole in the wall of contemporary rhetoric. We who “taught the matches / how to strike” are given an aperture to view our own participation in history. Beyond holding witness, these poems provoke action. Are we—sharing a home, a country, a planet (on fire!)—actually in this together or are we just pretending? You will be known by what you choose: will you be a bearer or a borer of fruit?
–Benjamin Garcia, author of Thrown in the Throat

Moira Magneson

Over the years, Moira Magneson has worked as a river guide, artist’s model, truck driver, television writer, editor, and community college writing instructor. A Northern California native, she lives in the Sierra foothills where she has spearheaded many art actions and initiatives, including El Dorado County’s Poetry Out Loud Competition, Veterans’ Voices, Barbaric Yawp, and Black Lives: An American Overture. In 2024, she was the resident poet for ForestSong, a community arts project exploring solastalgia, biophilia, and resilience in the face of wildfire devastation. And just recently, she was named El Dorado County’s Poet Laureate 25-27. Magneson is the author of A River Called Home: A River Fable, an illustrated novella (Toad Road Press, 2024). In the Eye of the Elephant is her first full-length collection of poems.

ABOUT IN THE EYE OF THE ELEPHANT
Moira Magneson’s In the Eye of the Elephant is an extraordinary collection of poems. I’ve rarely seen a book so exquisite in its centering of the natural world or in its honoring of the animal within us as well as those animals alongside us. Yet these poems are also dazzling and explosive in their reckonings with personal family wreckage, and so deeply moving, so deeply consoling in both their private and public grieving. Magneson writes, “I praise Earth as it is, its holy cup my heaven.” What a timely balm this book will be to its readers, and what a treasure of visionary human compassion they will find.
—David St. John, author of Prayer for My Daughter
I am drawn to Moira Magneson’s poems for the grime and gristle of their language—“elisions and plosives swept / piecemeal and stained // off the slaughterhouse floor”—for storytelling that stares pain in the face and delivers a hard-earned, unexpected beauty that is possible because of a clear-eyed placement in the natural world. This world is not romanticized but instead made wondrous through images that invite readers to consider their own station in the wild. In the Eye of the Elephant is rewarding on numerous levels; I’ll come back to it again and again.
—Albert Garcia, author of A Meal Like That

Second Tuesday Poetry presents FIVE FOR TEN: Five Central Valley Poets
2025-10-14 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry: Five for Ten, featuring five Central Valley poets:

Casey Giffen
Daley Perry
Cynthia Barstad
Paloma Contreras
Melchor Sahagun III

Date: Tuesday, October 14, 2025
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, in the Roseburg Square shopping center
Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event. Hosted by Gillian Wegener
CASEY GIFFEN:
A retired teacher of 40 years, Casey enjoys creating on-demand poems on his manual, Smith-Corona typewriter. His poetry has been published in Modesto Poets’ Corner Contests, Penumbra, and the Hughson Chronicle. Acts of Becoming is his second poetry collection.
PALOMA CONTRERAS:
Paloma Contreras is a Mexican, bilingual poet and educator. Most of her writing is autobiographical and deals with themes of loss.
MELCHOR SAHAGUN III:
Melchor Sahagun III is a poet and corny romantic who lives in Stockton. His collection, Sorry I’m Late, was published by Tuleberg Press.
DALEY PERRY:
Daley Perry is a Central Valley native who lived in Tennessee for 15 years before (very happily) returning home in 2019. She loves writing angsty poetry that explores themes of spirituality, smashing the patriarchy, pop culture, and loving our bodies.
CYNTHIA BARSTAD: Cynthia Barstad, an early childhood educator for 30 years before she retired, has shared her words with her family, friends, and strangers for years. She has been published in Stanislaus Connections along with her granddaughter Jenissa, who shares Cynthia’s passion for words.

Second Tuesday Reading featuring Marisol Baca & Gillian Wegener at Bookish
2025-11-11 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg Ave, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
Please join us at Bookish Modesto as we feature two tremendous Central Valley poets: Gillian Wegener and Marisol Baca.
Marisol Baca teaches English, Literature, and Creative Writing at Fresno City College. She teaches Honors in the Leon S. Peters Honors Program, and she also teaches as a part of the RAIN program (Resources for American Indian Needs). Baca is the author of a book of poems called Tremor, and she was named Fresno’s first woman and first Chicana/Latinx Poet Laureate (2019-2021). Marisol’s poem about the naming of Fresno has been designated the city’s official poem.
Gillian Wegener is the author of one chapbook and two full-length collections of poetry: Lifting One Foot, Lifting the Other (In the Grove Press, 2001), The Opposite of Clairvoyance (2008), and This Sweet Haphazard (2017), both from Sixteen Rivers Press. She is also the founding president of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center, a previous Poet Laureate for the City of Modesto (2012-2016), and a two-time recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. She is a long-time educator in Oakdale and has lived in Modesto longer than she’s lived anywhere else.
The reading starts at 7:00 at Bookish Modesto. With open mic following featured poets.

Second Tuesday - MoSt Member Potluck/Open Mic
2025-12-09 18:00 - 20:00 | The Dragonfly Art for Life, 1210 J Street, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
Join us for our December reading at The Dragonfly- Art for Life for a joyful open mic and potluck for members of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center.
We’d love to have you there! It’s not too late to join MoSt–you can join at the door, even.
