BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center - ECPv6.15.13//NONSGML v1.0//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H X-Robots-Tag:noindex X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Los_Angeles BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 TZNAME:PDT DTSTART:20200308T100000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST DTSTART:20201101T090000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 TZNAME:PDT DTSTART:20210314T100000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST DTSTART:20211107T090000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 TZNAME:PDT DTSTART:20220313T100000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST DTSTART:20221106T090000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 TZNAME:PDT DTSTART:20230312T100000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST DTSTART:20231105T090000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 TZNAME:PDT DTSTART:20240310T100000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST DTSTART:20241103T090000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230711T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230711T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20230625T014404Z LAST-MODIFIED:20230709T195639Z UID:2817-1689102000-1689105600@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Aideed Medina and Ramón García DESCRIPTION:Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Aideed Medina and Ramón García\, hosted by Stella Beratlis \nDate: Tuesday\, July 11\, 2023\nTime: 7:00 pm PST on Zoom–RSVP required:\nhttps://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYld-CrrzIiE9f-nC5FZF4UnTu3ZCbULvXC. After registering\, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. \nOpen mic: 3 mins per poet\, follows the featured readers. Open mic sign-up.  \nAideed Medina\nAideed 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. \nAbout 31 Hummingbird\n31 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. \nAideed Medina’s hummingbird poems are cross-pollinators: She brushes our tongues and eyes with the poetics of aerodynamic words. \nHer 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. \nRamón García\nRamón 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. \nGarcía 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. \n 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. \nAbout The Chronicles\n“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 URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-featuring-aideed-medina-and-ramon-garcia/ CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Copy-of-Second-Tuesday-July-2023-533-×-616-px.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230613T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230613T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20230602T171620Z LAST-MODIFIED:20230602T171737Z UID:2803-1686682800-1686686400@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Lynn Hansen\, Richard Robbins\, and Thomas Mitchell DESCRIPTION: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.\n\nABOUT LYNN HANSEN\nLynn 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.\n\nABOUT RICHARD ROBBINS\nRichard 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.”\n“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\n\nABOUT THOMAS MITCHELL\nThomas 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.\n—Thomas Aslin\, author of Salvage and A Moon Over Wings\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nYou are invited to a Zoom meeting.\nWhen: Jun 13\, 2023 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)Register in advance for this meeting:\nhttps://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUqcuqvrDkrHN0lTrVUQlB77MvaiI83W4zMAfter registering\, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n  URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-featuring-lynn-hansen-richard-robbins-and-thomas-mitchell/ LOCATION:Zoom CATEGORIES:Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/image_6483441-e1685725898900.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230509T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230509T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20230424T190953Z LAST-MODIFIED:20230507T204218Z UID:2748-1683658800-1683662400@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Bryan Medina\, Joseph Rios\, Michael Meyerhofer\, and Kenneth Chacón DESCRIPTION:Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Four Fresno Poets: Bryan Medina\, Joseph Rios\, Michael Meyerhofer\, and Kenneth Chacón. \nHosted by Gillian Wegener\nDate: Tuesday\, May 9\, 2022\nTime: 7:00 pm PDT\non Zoom–RSVP required:\nhttps://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAuceuuqDIjG9D7nH7UsdTrO5qDQlW6f7Lp \nAfter registering\, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. \n\nBryan Medina\n 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. \nJoseph Rios\nBorn 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.  \nMichael Meyerhofer\nMichael 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.  \nKennth Chacón\nKenneth 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.  URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/may2023/ CATEGORIES:Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/May-2023-Second-Tues-900-×-1200-px_updated-1.png ORGANIZER;CN="Stella Beratlis":MAILTO:stellab@mostpoetry.org END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230411T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230411T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20230327T210011Z LAST-MODIFIED:20230327T210011Z UID:2728-1681239600-1681243200@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry featuring 2023 Sixteen Rivers Press authors Matthew M. Monte & Joseph Zaccardi DESCRIPTION:We are so excited to feature Matthew M. Monte and Joseph Zaccardi for our Second Tuesday reading on April 11\, 2023.  \nPlease RSVP to get Zoom link for reading:  https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUodeGrrzkjHdfBfZG3JJnhhyxHl8NFvfZ8 \nHosted by Modesto poet laureate emeritus Stella Beratlis; open mic follows featured poets. (Open mic sign-up.) \nMATTHEW MONTE\nMatthew 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. \nhttps://www.matthew-monte.com/ \nAll 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. \nAbout ALL TOMORROW’S TRAIN RIDES \nThrough 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.  \n—Thea Matthews\, author of Unearth [The Flowers] \nMatthew 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.  \nRead these fine poems and encounter some part of your own unvoiced life. \n—Beau Beausoleil\, author of A Glyphic House: New and Selected Poems 1976–2019 \nJOSEPH ZACCARDI\nJoseph 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. \n  \nIn 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. \nAbout SONGBIRDS OF THE NINE RIVERS \nThe 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.  \n––Ann Robinson\, author of Stone Window \nHistorical\, 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. \n-–Jie Tian\, author of Native Songs and Migration Songs \nIt 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. \n––Mai Sato\, Yokohama College of Art and Design URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-featuring-2023-sixteen-rivers-press-authors-matthew-m-monte-joseph-zaccardi/ CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Second-Tues-April-2023.png ORGANIZER;CN="Stella Beratlis":MAILTO:stellab@mostpoetry.org END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230314T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230314T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20230208T203040Z LAST-MODIFIED:20230208T203040Z UID:2673-1678820400-1678824000@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Rooja Mohassessey & Farnaz Fatemi DESCRIPTION:We are so excited to feature Rooja Mohassessy and Farnaz Fatemi for our Second Tuesday reading in March. \nPlease RSVP to get Zoom link for reading:  https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYucOmqrzIrGdb0wNX9dF4OQqZv7IRjNEOT \nHosted by Modesto poet laureate emeritus Stella Beratlis; open mic follows featured poets. (Open mic sign-up.) \nRooja Mohassessy\nRooja 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. \nABOUT WHEN YOUR SKY RUNS INTO MINE\n“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 \n“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 \nMohassessy’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 \nFarnaz Fatemi\nFarnaz 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. \nABOUT SISTER TONGUE\n“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 \n“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 \n“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“ \nSister 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 URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-featuring-rooja-mohassessey-farnaz-fatemi/ LOCATION:Zoom CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Second-Tues-Mar-2023.png ORGANIZER;CN="Stella Beratlis":MAILTO:stellab@mostpoetry.org END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230214T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230214T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20230124T003901Z LAST-MODIFIED:20230125T230112Z UID:2651-1676401200-1676404800@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Tamer Mostafa & Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas DESCRIPTION:Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Tamer Mostafa and Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas \nHosted by Stella Beratlis\nDate: Tuesday\, Feb. 14\,  2023\nTime: 7:00 pm PST\nRSVP for Zoom link\nOpen  Mic Signup: https://forms.gle/d51j2WqGmBrzrTLT9. 3 mins per reader\, please.  \nTAMER MOSTAFA \nTamer 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. \nCAROL LYNN STEVENSON GRELLAS  \nCarol 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/ \n  URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/2651/ CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/second-tuesday-poetry-feb-2023.png ORGANIZER;CN="Stella Beratlis":MAILTO:stellab@mostpoetry.org END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230110T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230110T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20221214T032512Z LAST-MODIFIED:20221227T215644Z UID:2585-1673377200-1673380800@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Brad Buchanan and Susan Cohen DESCRIPTION: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. \nRSVP for Zoom link \nOpen  Mic Signup: https://forms.gle/d51j2WqGmBrzrTLT9. 3 minutes per reader\, please.  \nSUSAN COHEN\nSusan 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\,  \nSusan’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. \nSusan’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). \nAbout Democracy of Fire\nA 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.” \n—Ellen Bass\, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets & author of Indigo \n  \nBrad Buchanan\nBrad 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. \nAbout CHIMERA\nBrad 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. \n–Susan Kelly-DeWitt\, author of SPIDER SEASON (Cold River Press\, 2016) and GRAVITATIONAL TUG (Main Street Rag Publishing\, 2020) \n  \nRegister in advance for this reading:\nhttps://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIkc-uopzIiE9CmsJAOxm1JzNtUdnMXYXqN \nAfter registering\, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/jan2023stp/ CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/January-2023-Second-Tues.png ORGANIZER;CN="Stella Beratlis":MAILTO:stellab@mostpoetry.org END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20221213T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20221213T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20221201T003945Z LAST-MODIFIED:20221207T182853Z UID:2561-1670958000-1670961600@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Beverly Burch and Linda Marie Prather DESCRIPTION:Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry\, featuring Beverly Burch and Linda Marie Prather. Hosted by Modesto poet laureate emeritus Stella Beratlis.  \nDate: Tuesday\, Dec 13\, 2022\nTime: 7:00 pm PST\nRSVP for Zoom link \nOpen mic follows featured readers. Please sign up and plan to read for about 3 minutes. \nBeverly Burch\nBeverly 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.  \nAbout Leave Me a Little Want\n“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.” \n-Julia Levine\, Ordinary Psalms \n\nLinda Maria Prather \nLinda 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. \nHer poetry appears in More Than Soil\, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets. Linda’s published\nwidely and received prizes from Penumbra\, Poets’ Dinner Contest\, and the Ina Coolbrith Circle. She has won\nthe 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. URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/2561/ CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/December-2022-Second-Tues-1.png ORGANIZER;CN="Stella Beratlis":MAILTO:stellab@mostpoetry.org END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20221108T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20221108T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20221026T174257Z LAST-MODIFIED:20221026T175608Z UID:2534-1667934000-1667937600@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Kiss Me Like You Voted: Election Night Open Mic DESCRIPTION: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. \nWith 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? \nOpen mic 15 poets max; 3 minutes per person–sign up to read at https://forms.gle/izdLKgzryo1uFzwLA \nRSVP for Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYscOqhpjgrGNZ9calCIAyo_9KPb7XWmAy_ \n  URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/2022nov8/ CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Second-Tues-2022-Nov-8-.png ORGANIZER;CN="Stella Beratlis":MAILTO:stellab@mostpoetry.org END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20221011T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20221011T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20220929T191945Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220930T020723Z UID:2483-1665514800-1665518400@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry Online featuring Cyrus Cassells & James Fujinami Moore DESCRIPTION:Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry Online featuring Cyrus Cassells and James Fujinami Moore  \nJoin 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. \nHosted by Stella Beratlis\nDate: Tuesday\, October 11\, 2022\nTime: 7:00 pm PST\nRSVP for Zoom link \nCyrus Cassells\nA 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. \nAbout The World That the Shooter Left Us\n“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  \n“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.”\n–Martin Espada \n  \nJames Fujinami Moore\nJames 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. \nAbout indecent hours \n“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 \n“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  \n  \nRegister in advance for this meeting:\nhttps://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcvduuqqD4rGdz7w9BSPEysavrDAG4cdbBq\nAfter registering\, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/oct2022/ CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Oct-2022-Second-Tues-Poetry-1.png ORGANIZER;CN="Stella Beratlis":MAILTO:stellab@mostpoetry.org END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220913T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220913T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20220831T180335Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220831T181832Z UID:2452-1663095600-1663099200@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Gary Thomas and Ian Miller DESCRIPTION:Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Gary Thomas and Ian Miller \nJoin 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. \nHosted by Stella Beratlis\nDate: Tuesday\, Sept 13\, 2022 \nTime: 7:00 pm PST\nOn Zoom–Please RSVP for link \nOpen mic follows featured poets. Three minutes per reader; please sign up for open mic. \nGary Thomas \nGary 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. \nAll the Connecting Lights\nAll 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.\n–Lee Herrick\, author of Scar and Flower \n 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.”\n–Gillian Wegener\, author of This Sweet Haphazard \n 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.\n–Maw Shein Win\, author of Storage Unit for the Spirit House \n\nIan Miller\n 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.  \nThe aforementioned books can be found for purchase here: https://linktr.ee/iandmiller URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/secondtues2022sep/ CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Sep-2022-Second-Tues.png ORGANIZER;CN="Stella Beratlis":MAILTO:stellab@mostpoetry.org END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220809T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220809T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20220731T183152Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220731T184205Z UID:2436-1660071600-1660075200@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry presents Field Studies: Poems We Love DESCRIPTION:[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.] \nSecond Tuesday Poetry presents Field Studies\, Poems We Love \nFIELD 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.  \nDate: Tuesday\, August 9\, 2022\nTime: 7:00 pm PST\nZoom RSVP required: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAkd-yuqzIuHN2hEdFucto5F3xrkxX-lplH\nAfter registering\, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-presents-field-studies-poems-we-love/ CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Field-Studies.png ORGANIZER;CN="Stella Beratlis":MAILTO:stellab@mostpoetry.org END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220712T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220712T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20220624T185025Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220707T234338Z UID:2392-1657652400-1657656000@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Linda Scheller & Zubair Ahmed DESCRIPTION:Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry\, featuring Zubair Ahmed and Linda Scheller  \nDate: Tuesday\, July 12\, 2022 \nTime: 7:00 pm PST \nRSVP for Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZArcu6oqD4sGNDZmBo6MV6JoEG46YsUVpYJ  \n  \nLinda Scheller\nLinda Scheller is a poet\, playwright\, and essayist whose work has recently been published in Colorado Review\, On the Seawall\, Arkana\, Sugar House Review\, Terrain\, The Museum of Americana\, and The Wild Word. Her first book of poetry\, Fierce Light\, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2017. Recent honors include finalist for the Barrow Street Press Poetry Book Prize and The Word Works Washington Prize as well as Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations. She is a founding board member of MoSt Poetry\, serves on the Stanislaus County Arts Council\, programs for KCBP Community Radio\, and belongs to the Modesto Chapter of the National League of American Pen Women. Wind & Children\, her new poetry book\, was published by Main Street Rag on June 8\, 2022. \n “Linda Scheller’s Wind and Children is a tragic and beautiful exposition of a teacher’s heart. Tinged with the uncertain fates of her children\, California climate chaos\, and bright birdsong\, these poems sing as a poignant “flute for the wind” in a broken “system that fosters indifference.” Through exquisite metaphor and gripping imagery\, this “mother of thousands” pens 36 years of service with grace and wonder\, regret and hope. And like a true teacher—with love. ~Kai Coggin\, educator and author of Mining for Stardust \n“In Linda Scheller’s Wind and Children\, fifth graders sit “hunched and silent/like a cloud of butterflies/forced to earth.” We worry over them\, their parents\, their homes\, the violence that surrounds them. Scheller refuses to turn away from difficult realities\, yet seeks understanding\, looking to the natural world. Reader\, you’ll travel far before you’ll find a more thoughtful guide than the one you meet and learn to love in the pages of this moving\, care-filled book.” ~Christopher Citro\, author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun \n“Scheller brings the focus of her lens to the world\, showcasing a lifetime of literary lessons\, poetic remembrances\, and artistic manifestations. This volume is a beautiful addition to her work.” ~Indigo Moor\, Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something \nFor more information and links to publications\, please go to lindascheller.com. \nZubair Ahmed\nZubair Ahmed was born and raised in Dhaka\, Bangladesh. He works as an engineer in Oakland. He also writes poetry\, having been named by Poets & Writers magazine as one of the top debut poets of 2012. His collection City of Rivers (McSweeney’s\, 2012) was nominated for the California Book Award. Zubair’s works have appeared in Poetry Magazine and The Believer\, among others\, and have been translated into Swedish and French.  \n  URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-featuring-linda-scheller-zubair-ahmed/ CATEGORIES:Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Second-Tues-July-2022-1.png ORGANIZER;CN="Stella Beratlis":MAILTO:stellab@mostpoetry.org END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220614T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220614T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20220606T230631Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220606T230631Z UID:2375-1655233200-1655236800@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry with Clay Hunt and Briana Muñoz DESCRIPTION:Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry\, featuring Clay Hunt and Briana Muñoz\, hosted by Stella Beratlis.  \nTuesday\, June 14\, 2022\n7:00 pm PST w/ open mic \non Zoom–RSVP required: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcvcOqvrz8pG9Yi9Z0cV9-AoGodS4mymh-Q \nRSVP Open Mic (3 min per poet): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSezxMg1qBq4z4NyNQWRckkONw_hR-JWWJ8HsJ__XjSDKx34GA/viewform \n  \nBriana Muñoz\nBriana Muñoz is a Poet from Southern California. She is the author of Loose Lips published by Prickly Pear Publishing (2019) and of Everything Is Returned to the Soil published by FlowerSong Press (2021). She has performed poetry in places like UNEAC (The National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba)\, CECUT (The Tijuana Cultural Center)\, El Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego and beyond.  \nBriana currently serves as the Volunteer Event Coordinator for the Sims Library of Poetry and the Volunteer Event Coordinator for the Luis J Rodriguez for CA Governor 2022 campaign. \nAbout Everything is Returned to the Soil/ Todo Vuelve a la Tierra:  \nEverything Is Returned to the Soil is a bilingual\, full-length poetry collection of poems on the spiritual\, political\, and cultural realms. Reading Briana Muñoz’s poetry is like following her as she reclaims her Indigenous culture\, recounts moments growing up wedged in-between two borders\, all while breaking long existing patriarchal structures within her existence as a woman of color.  \nhttps://linktr.ee/Awomanofwords \nLinks to purchase books: https://www.flowersongpress.com/store/p/everythingisreturnedtothesoil\nhttps://www.pricklypearpublishing.com/shop/loose-lips \nClay Hunt\nClay Hunt is the author of three chapbooks: Born Shane\, published by Two Key Customs\, Young When the Sun Went Down\, published by Budget Press\, and Sewn-On Patch\, published by Between Shadows Press. He has poems published in many journals\, some which include Spectra Poets\, The Raw Art Review\, Paper and Ink Literary Zine\, The Rye Whiskey Review\, Penumbra\, Song of the San Joaquin\, Seppuku Quarterly\, and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. Some of his poems have won awards such as 2nd place in poetry in Modesto Junior College’s Celebration of the Humanities\, The Dark Sire’s TDS Awards 2021 for poetry\, and the City of Modesto’s Poet’s Corner Contest. He currently lives in San Francisco with his wife\, Laura. \nYoung When the Sun Went Down chapbook can be found at Budgetpress.net \nEmail: Chuntjr89@gmail.com\nInstragram: @claytanic89 URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-with-clay-hunt-and-briana-munoz/ CATEGORIES:Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Second-Tues-June-2022-.png ORGANIZER;CN="Stella Beratlis":MAILTO:stellab@mostpoetry.org END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220510T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220510T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20220425T005335Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220425T021834Z UID:2364-1652209200-1652212800@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry Reading featuring Susan Kelly-Dewitt & Linda Toren DESCRIPTION:Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry\, featuring Susan Kelly-Dewitt and Linda Toren.  \nHosted by Gary Thomas  \nDate: Tuesday\, May 10\, 2022 \nTime: 7:00 pm PST \non Zoom–RSVP required: \nhttps://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIpf–tqTwjHtzOiKfx1CE232QV992N-gyG \nAfter registering\, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. \nAbout Susan Kelly-Dewitt\nSusan 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). \nHer 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.  \nSusan 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. \nOver 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. \nGatherer’s Alphabet is the first book in Gunpowder Press’s California Poets Series. \nPraise for Gatherer’s Alphabet: \nThese 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 \nSusan 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 \nWhat 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 \nComing 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 \nAbout Linda Toren\nLinda 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. \nHer 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.   \nRaven 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.  \nLinda 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).  \nPraise for Raven Braids the Wind: \n \nLinda 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) \n  \nRaven 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) URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-reading-4/ CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Picture1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220412T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220412T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20220317T061239Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220324T164524Z UID:2348-1649790000-1649793600@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry featuring the poetry of Mexican poet Ulalume González de León DESCRIPTION:Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry\, featuring the poetry of Mexican poet Ulalume González de León from Plagiarisms/Plagios Vol. 2 \nwith translators Terry Ehret &Nancy J. Morales and guest poet-translator William O’Daly.  \nHosted by Stella Beratlis \nZoom–RSVP required: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYvdu-oqDktGNSizk4tQoG2D1gD0ynwn0CD. After registering\, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. \nOpen mic signup link (3 min per poet): https://forms.gle/PHW4ixpkG3U3zwJk8 \nAbout Ulalume González de León \n  \nUlalume González de León was born in 1928 in Montevideo\, Uruguay\, the daughter of two poets\, Roberto Ibañez and Sara de Ibañez. She studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Mexico. \nWhile living in Mexico in 1948\, Ulalume became a naturalized Mexican citizen. She married painter and architect Teodoro González de León\, and together they had three children. She published essays\, stories\, and poems\, and worked with Mexican poet and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz as an editor of two literary journals\, Plural and Vuelta. She also translated the work of H.D.\, Elizabeth Bishop\, Ted Hughes\, Lewis Carroll\, and e.e. cummings. \nIn the 1970’s in Latin America\, González de León was part of a generation of women writers challenging the traditional identities of women\, marriage\, and relationships. Her poetry earned her many awards\, including the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize\, the Flower of Laura Poetry Prize\, and the Alfonso X Prize. Ulalume González de León died in 2009 of respiratory failure and complications of Alzheimer’s. \nAbout the Translators\nTerry Ehret\, one of the founders of Sixteen Rivers Press\, has published four collections of poetry\, most recently Night Sky Journey from Kelly’s Cove Press. Her literary awards include the National Poetry Series\, the California Book Award\, the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize\, a nomination for the Northern California Book Reviewer’s Award\, and five Pushcart Prize nominations. From 2004–2006\, she served as the poet laureate of Sonoma County where she lives and teaches writing. \nNancy J. Morales\, a first-generation American of Puerto Rican parents\, earned her bachelor’s degree from Rutgers College\, a master’s in teaching English as a Second Language from Adelphi University\, and a doctorate in education from Teachers College at Columbia University. She has taught at Dominican University\, College of Marin\, Sonoma State University\, and other schools\, from elementary to graduate levels. Currently she is a board member for the Northern California Chapter of the Fulbright Alumni Association and teaches Spanish to private clients. \nAbout William O’Daly\nWilliam O’Daly is co-founder of Copper Canyon Press and a noted Neruda translator. URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-featuring-featuring-the-poetry-of-mexican-poet-ulalume-gonzalez-de-leon/ CATEGORIES:Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Second-Tuesday-April-12.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220308T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220308T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20220209T212047Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220209T215248Z UID:2334-1646766000-1646769600@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry presents Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets Reading DESCRIPTION:MoSt is thrilled to host a Zoom reading with Christopher Buckley\, Gordon Preston\, Lee Herrick\, and Sam Pereira\, who will talk about and read work from the anthology Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets. The reading will include poems and excerpts from interviews and essays.  \nWith open mic following the featured poets; 3 minutes per reader. \nWhen: Tuesday\, March 8\, 2022 at 7 pm PST\nWhere: Zoom (RSVP in advance for link: https://tinyurl.com/4c3byekj)  \nLink for open mic signup: https://forms.gle/xVfDF4hUx89REVmq7 \n  URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-presents-naming-the-lost-the-fresno-poets-reading/ CATEGORIES:Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/naming-the-lost-fb-cover-1.png ORGANIZER;CN="Stella Beratlis":MAILTO:stellab@mostpoetry.org END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220208T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220208T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20220123T050020Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220123T050020Z UID:2292-1644346800-1644350400@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Kelly Cressio-Moeller & John Sibley Williams DESCRIPTION:The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present the Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Kelly Cressio-Moeller and John Sibley Williams\, hosted by Stella Beratlis with an open mic following the featured poets.  \nTuesday\, February 8\, 2022 \n7 pm PST \nRSVP for Zoom  \nSign up for open mic (3 mins per reader) \nKelly Cressio-Moeller\nKelly Cressio-Moeller is a poet and visual artist. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes\, Best New Poets\, and Best of the Net\, and have appeared widely in journals and at literary websites including Gargoyle\, North American Review\, Poet Lore\, Salamander\, THRUSH Poetry Journal\, Valparaiso Poetry Review\, Water~Stone Review\, and ZYZZYVA\, among others. An associate editor at Glass Lyre Press\, she lives in the Bay Area with her husband\, two sons\, and basset hound. Shade of Blue Trees from Two Sylvias Press (Finalist for the Wilder Prize) is her first poetry collection. Visit her website at www.kellycressiomoeller.com \nJohn Sibley Williams\nJohn Sibley Williams is the author of seven poetry collections. The most recent are the forthcoming Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (winner of the Cider Press Review Book Award\, 2021) and The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award\, 2021)\, just published this month. A twenty-six-time Pushcart nominee\, John is the winner of numerous awards\, including the Laux/Millar Prize\, Wabash Prize\, Philip Booth Award and others. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry\, Yale Review\, Midwest Quarterly\, Southern Review\, Prairie Schooner\, and Poetry Northwest\, among many others. John holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rivier University and an MA in Book Publishing from Portland State University. He is the founder and head teacher of Caesura Poetry Workshop\, a virtual workshop series\, and he serves as co-founder and editor of The Inflectionist Review. He also works as a poetry editor and book coach. John lives in Portland\, Oregon. \n  URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-featuring-kelly-cressio-moeller-john-sibley-williams/ CATEGORIES:Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Driving-Back-to-1995.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220111T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220111T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20211223T230639Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211224T004123Z UID:2237-1641927600-1641931200@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Erin Rodoni & Dana Koster DESCRIPTION:The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center invites you to the first Second Tuesday Poetry reading of 2022\, featuring Erin Rodoni and Dana Koster.  \nWhen: Tuesday\, January 11\, 2022 at 7 pm PST\nWhere: Zoom (RSVP https://tinyurl.com/4c3byekj)\n \nERIN RODONI\nErin Rodoni’s most recent book is And if the Woods Carry You\, winner of the 2020 Southern Indiana Review Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Her two previous collections are: Body\, in Good Light and A Landscape for Loss. Her poems have been published in journals and anthologies such as Blackbird\, Poetry Northwest\, and Best New Poets. She has won awards from AWP\, Ninth Letter\, and the Montreal International Poetry Prize. She teaches at the Writing Salon in San Francisco and serves on the board of the Marin Poetry Center.  \nAnd if the Woods Carry You\, Winner of the 2020 Michael Waters Poetry Prize: On the brink of climate catastrophe\, a mother grappling with her choice to bring children into an apocalyptic world sends her daughters into the woods of fairy tale as a rite of initiation. The woods carry her fears of extinction— devastating fires\, rising seas\, and the predatory dangers of girlhood—but also contain the transformative magic of love\, interdependence\, and renewal. And if the Woods Carry You roots into the wild heart of motherhood\, where worry and wonder intertwine. \n“Like all great fairy tales\, Erin Rodoni’s poems are a glorious marriage of the domestic and the dangerous. There are tests and transformations\, solitudes and sacrifices\, births and burials. Everything is changing into something else\, something energized\, erotic\, and enchanted. But it is the poet’s attention to craft that lifts these poems from the beguiling world of mere narrative into the more magical realm of art. In language that feels both ancient and current\, Rodoni manages to craft lyrics that seem to come from some other world while speaking truths to this one. This is a marvelous book with a poetic voice to enliven even the wildest woods.” –Dean Rader\, author of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry and Landscape Portrait Figure Form \nDANA KOSTER\nDana Koster was born in St. Paul\, Minnesota and grew up in Ventura\, California. She earned her English degree from UC Berkeley and MFA in poetry from Cornell University. From 2011-2013\, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. She lives in Modesto\, California with her husband and two sons\, where she works as a wedding photographer\, occasional freelance writer and half of the art partnership Broad Sides with her collaborator\, Chelsea America. \nDana’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in EPOCH\, Indiana Review\, Southern Humanities Review\, The Cincinnati Review\, PN Review\, Clackamas Literary Review\, THRUSH Poetry Journal and many others.  She has work in the anthologies America\, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience\, Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books\, Haiku of the Living Dead and More Than Soil\, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets. In 2012\, she was the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize and a Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award. Her first book\, Binary Stars\, was published by Carolina Wren Press in 2017. She makes a lot of claims about immortality and ghosts on her twitter account. \n“We need a new word (astro-tropism?) for the poetry of Binary Stars. For the way it leaps into stellar depths to cast a gaze sharp as a hummingbird’s beak back on the extended family cluster. Two stars\, a larger and a smaller\, in tight rotation\, yield binary poems in clumps and couplets in the first-person dual and second-person singular: to the baby\, the husband (with orbiting cows\, horses\, and almonds)\, the burned-out but still gravitational father-in-law and mother\, and the therapist\, whose analytical gaze is returned with equal intensity. Koster has written a domestic poetry not “of the heart\,” not soft-focused\, but of the barycenter\, the binary center of gravity\, in which the familiar\, thrown off kilter\, becomes alienated\, estranged\, and new. Dare you read a poetry at the white heat? Then open Binary Stars\, an incandescent book of the first magnitude.”\n—John Shoptaw\, author of Times Beach \n  URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-featuring-erin-rodoni-dana-koster/ CATEGORIES:Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/MoSt-Gala-2017-0001.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20211214T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20211214T203000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20211130T062439Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211130T062439Z UID:2227-1639508400-1639513800@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry featuring George Higgins and Rick Bursky DESCRIPTION: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.  \nGeorge 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. \nRick 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. URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-featuring-george-higgins-and-rick-bursky/ CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/December-2021_SecondTues.png ORGANIZER;CN="Stella Beratlis":MAILTO:stellab@mostpoetry.org END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20211109T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20211109T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20211025T155344Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211109T235959Z UID:2198-1636484400-1636488000@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry Reading featuring Cristina Sandoval & Manny Moreno DESCRIPTION:The‌ ‌Modesto-Stanislaus‌ ‌Poetry‌ ‌Center‌ ‌features‌ ‌poets Cristina Sandoval and Manny Moreno for the November installment‌ ‌of‌ ‌Second‌ ‌Tuesday‌ ‌Poetry.‌ ‌Join‌ ‌us‌ ‌to hear these two poets read for us as first-time featured poets on Tuesday\,‌ November 9\, at‌ ‌7‌ ‌pm‌\, ‌on‌ ‌Google Meet. Hosted‌ ‌by‌ ‌Stella‌  ‌Beratlis‌ ‌with‌ ‌open‌ ‌mic‌ ‌following‌ ‌the‌ ‌featured‌ ‌readers.‌ ‌  \nGoogle Meet link: https://meet.google.com/yzr-effe-nrh\nOtherwise\, to join by phone\, dial +1 760-654-5100 and enter this PIN: 914 592 889#\n \nSign up for Open Mic: https://forms.gle/v8J9cK9RXn4YDwwc9 \nCRISTINA SANDOVAL \nCristina Sandoval is an MFA student at Fresno State University and a poet to the bone. Cristina has been a purveyor of words since she can remember. She is a proud Chicana and is desperately in love with language. She often mixes her two languages\, Spanish and English\, in an attempt to bridge the beauty and hurt in both. Her work often focuses on family\, mental health\, and finding meaning in the terrible. She has two books on Amazon\, Moon Ride\, and We Need Bad Bitches. Her work has been featured in Penumbra\, Artifact Nouveau\, Exist(ir)\, and Dystopian Dance Party. Her thesis work is centered around the nature of family\, culture\, and hair. She is from Modesto\, California\, and now lives in Fresno. And if you were wondering\, yes\, she misses Mr. T’s Donuts!  \nMANNY MONOLIN \nMonolin “Manny” Moreno is the author of four books\, the most recent of which is a collection of poems\, Longview Road. Manny’s previous works include Scared–Coming Full Circle: A Memoir; his first poetry collection\, The Bridge Is Gone; and The Elder: A Tribute\, about the importance of elders in the community and about two Native American elders in particular.  \nHis poems are about growing up in Livingston\, where his family’s roots were established in the early 1900s\, and about a wide range of topics.  \nManny is a Member of the Black Wolf Honor Society Gourd Clan\, a member of Native American Church and Sundances yearly in South Dakota. Manny is of  Yaqui/Tarascan descent. Manny has been featured in interviews on Native Voice TV\, Channel 10\, Sacramento and Company\, KKUP Radio/Indian Time and Two Roads Productions. He has been a speaker at Modesto Junior College and various events. He was nominated for the Pushcart Award in 2011. \nACCESS THE READING:  \nGoogle Meet: To join the video meeting\, click this link: meet.google.com/yzr-effe-nrh \nTo join by phone instead\, dial (US) +1 760-654-5100 and enter this PIN: 914 592 889# \nMore phone numbers: https://tel.meet/yzr-effe-nrh?pin=8948151384183 \n  URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-reading-3/ LOCATION:Google Meet CATEGORIES:Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/AUGUST-2021-SECOND-TUESDAY-Facebook-Post.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20211012T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20211012T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20210929T212754Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211012T235824Z UID:2186-1634065200-1634068800@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Julia B. Levine & Matthew Lippman plus open mic DESCRIPTION: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.  \nJULIA B. LEVINE \nJulia 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. \nMATTHEW LIPPMAN\nMatthew 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. \nTuesday\, October 12\, 2021 at 7 pm PDT \nZoom link: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/91357899430 \nOpen Mic signup: https://forms.gle/j6dsvm31MA2377Pu6 \n———— \nJoin from PC\, Mac\, Linux\, iOS or Android: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/91357899430 \n  \nOr iPhone one-tap (US Toll):  +16699006833\,91357899430#  or +12532158782\,91357899430#  \n  \nOr Telephone: \n    Dial: \n    +1 669 900 6833 (US Toll) \n    +1 253 215 8782 (US Toll) \n    +1 346 248 7799 (US Toll) \n    +1 646 876 9923 (US Toll) \n    +1 301 715 8592 (US Toll) \n    +1 312 626 6799 (US Toll) \n    Meeting ID: 913 5789 9430 \n  URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/2186/ CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/MoSt-Gala-2017-0001.jpg ORGANIZER;CN="Stella Beratlis":MAILTO:stellab@mostpoetry.org END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210914T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210914T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20210904T172100Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210904T172144Z UID:2146-1631646000-1631649600@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry Reading DESCRIPTION:Localpalooza features a smorgasbord of poetry by local writers from Modesto and the greater Stanislaus County area via Zoom on Tuesday\,  September 14th\, 2021 at 7:00pm Pacific Time. Please join us! \n\n\n\nTopic: Second Tuesday Reading: Poetry Localpalooza\nTime: Sep 14\, 2021 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)\n\nJoin from PC\, Mac\, Linux\, iOS or Android: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/95590128285\n\nOr iPhone one-tap (US Toll):  +16699006833\,95590128285#  or +13462487799\,95590128285#\n\nOr Telephone:\n    Dial:\n    +1 669 900 6833 (US Toll)\n    +1 346 248 7799 (US Toll)\n    +1 253 215 8782 (US Toll)\n    +1 301 715 8592 (US Toll)\n    +1 312 626 6799 (US Toll)\n    +1 646 876 9923 (US Toll)\n    Meeting ID: 955 9012 8285\n    International numbers available: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/u/abYljE2M3T\n\nOr an H.323/SIP room system:\n    H.323: 162.255.37.11 (US West) or 162.255.36.11 (US East)\n    Meeting ID: 955 9012 8285\n\n    SIP: 95590128285@zoomcrc.com\n\nOr Skype for Business (Lync):\n    SIP:95590128285@lync.zoom.us\n\n\n\n\n\n  URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-reading-2/ LOCATION:Zoom CATEGORIES:Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Untitled-design.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210810T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210810T200000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20210726T032631Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210729T052449Z UID:2099-1628622000-1628625600@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday Poetry Reading with Nicca Ray and Michelle Cernuto DESCRIPTION:The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center features authors Nicca Ray and Michelle Cernuto for the August installment of Second Tuesday Poetry. Join us for a great mix of poetry\, ghost fiction\, and punk rock memoir on Tuesday\, August 10 at 7 pm on Zooom. Hosted by Stella Beratlis with open mic following the featured readers.\n\nZoom: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/91909197367\nOpen mic signup: https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday\n\nNICCA RAY\nNicca Ray’s poetry collection\, BACK SEAT BABY\, was recently published by Chris D.’s Poison Fang Books. In the forward\, Ann Magnusun writes\, “Plumbing the depths of uncertainty and loneliness\, Ray finds gold in the collective swamplands of our souls.” The poet\, Charles Plymell\, calls Back Seat Baby the “High Noon of poetry.”\n\nNicca Ray’s memoir RAY BY RAY: A DAUGHTER’S TAKE ON THE LEGEND OF NICHOLAS RAY (Three Rooms Press\, 2020) has been called “harrowing\, beautifully written and near-impossible to put down” by Shelf Awareness and “a daring revelation of strength and survival\, told unflinchingly\, bravely\, with empathy\, sympathy and ultimately an understanding of a great artist who is almost impossible to fathom\,” by Ronee Blakely\, actress\, singer and Academy Award nominee.\nNicca is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a 2020 Acker Award recipient.\n\nMICHELLE CERNUTO\nMichelle Cernuto is the author of the recently published YOU USED TO KNOW ME\, a fictional coming-of-age account of growing up in Las Vegas in the 80s.\n\n“A mash note from beyond the grave to a lost Vegas. 1980s punk teen dysfunction… a melancholic travelogue through a spiritual wasteland. The self-effacing murder victim gives us a matter-of-fact\, blow-by-blow commentary as she haunts both her friends and her predator in a suburban\, desert dystopia…. We see ominous harbingers of Death rushing headlong towards us\, much like an out-of-control carnival ride…locked into one final\, endlessly accelerating rollercoaster to oblivion. There’s no getting off\, and the effect is harrowing and masterful.– Chris D. (author of No Evil Star\, Dragon Wheel Splendor and Other Love Stories of Violence and Dread\, Mother’s Worry\, et.al.; singer/songwriter of the bands The Flesh Eaters and Divine Horsemen)\n\n“A vivid recollection of a crazy time in the crazy place of the American Southwest…a transitional time before entire cities were turned into theme parks. Magically real\, her story echoes the truth of the women I grew up with\, who fought an oppression they could feel empirically but not always articulate with street smarts and sheer guts. And then there are the ghosts…” – Victor Krummenacher (of bands Camper Van Beethoven\, Monks of Doom and The Third Mind) \n\nJoin from PC\, Mac\, Linux\, iOS or Android: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/91909197367\nOr iPhone one-tap (US Toll): +16699006833\,91909197367# or +13462487799\,91909197367#\nOr Telephone:\nDial:\n+1 669 900 6833 (US Toll)\n+1 346 248 7799 (US Toll)\n+1 253 215 8782 (US Toll)\n+1 646 876 9923 (US Toll)\n+1 301 715 8592 (US Toll)\n+1 312 626 6799 (US Toll)\nMeeting ID: 919 0919 7367\nInternational numbers available: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/u/aeu6vPmQF URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-poetry-reading/ LOCATION:Zoom CATEGORIES:Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/AUGUST-2021-SECOND-TUES_Facebook-event-cover.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210608T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210608T203000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20210602T203025Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210602T203110Z UID:2017-1623178800-1623184200@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog - on Zoom! DESCRIPTION: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. \nJoin reading: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/94454258218 \nOpen mic following featured readers. To sign up:  https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday \n\nJennifer K. Sweeney \nJennifer 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. \nFoxlogic\, Fireweed can be purchased from the University of Nebraska Press\, linked from Jennifer’s website: https://www.jenniferksweeney.com/ \nAbout FOXLOGIC\, FIREWEED \n“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 \n​“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 \n\nIndigo Moor \nIndigo 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. \nIndigo 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. \nIndigo is a Cave Canem fellow\, former resident artist at 916 ink\, and a graduate member of the Artist’s Residency Institute for Teaching Artists. \nA 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. \nAbout EVERYBODY’S JONESIN’ FOR SOMETHING \n“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 \n“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 URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-barkin-dog-on-zoom-3/ LOCATION:Zoom CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/MoSt-Gala-2017-0001.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210511T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210511T203000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20210503T193549Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210503T193619Z UID:2002-1620759600-1620765000@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog - on Zoom DESCRIPTION: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. \nZoom link: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/92855890148 \nOpen Mic signup: https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday \n\nLelania Fowler \nBorn 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. \nAbout Under a Milk Glass Moon: \n“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 \n“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\nnever knew existed.” —Robert Lee Haycock \n  \nSalvatore Salerno \nSalvatore 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. \nSalvatore 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. URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-barkin-dog-5-2021/ LOCATION:Zoom CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/May2021SecondTuesday.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210413T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210413T203000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20210330T051626Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210330T051931Z UID:1976-1618340400-1618345800@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog - on Zoom! DESCRIPTION: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. \nOpen Mic signup: https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday \n\n\nStella 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. \nAbout Dust Bowl Venus: \nWith 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 \n“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 \n“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 \n\n\nDane 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/ \nAbout The World Is God’s Language: \n“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.”\n—David Sullivan\, author of Seed Shell Ash \n“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.”\n—Patrice Vecchione\, author of My Shouting\, Shattered\, Whispering Voice: A Guide to Writing Poetry & Speaking Your Truth URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-barkin-dog-4-2021/ LOCATION:Zoom CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/MoSt-Gala-2017-0001.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210309T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210309T203000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20210228T193424Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210228T193424Z UID:1935-1615316400-1615321800@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog - on Zoom! DESCRIPTION: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 \nOpen Mic signup: https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday \n\nIris 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 \nCathryn 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. URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-3-3021/ LOCATION:Zoom CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/3-2021-Second-Tuesday-Header.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210209T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210209T203000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20210120T193653Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210128T224945Z UID:1914-1612897200-1612902600@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog - on Zoom! DESCRIPTION:The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and host Stella Beratlis are pleased to welcome Josiah Luis Alderete and Anthony Cody for Second Tuesday Poetry on Tuesday Feb. 9\, 2021. Join the reading via Zoom at 7 pm: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/91076973120 \nOpen Mic signup: https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday \n\nJosiah Luis Alderete is a full blooded Pocho Spanglish speaking poet from La Area Bahia who learned to write poetry in the kitchen of his Mama’s Mexican restaurant. He first began performing his poetry in San Francisco’s Mission District at the infamous Cafe Babar’s Thursday night readings and was one of the founding members of San Francisco’s outspoken word troupe\, The Molotov Mouths. He is also a radio insurgente whose stories have appeared on KALW’s “Crosscurrents” and whose show\, “The Spanglish Power Hour\,” aired on KPFA. He curates and hosts the monthly Latinx reading series Speaking Axolotl at Nomadic Press in Oakland. Josiah Luis Alderete’s first book of poems\, Baby Axolotls y Old Pochos\, is forthcoming from Black Freighter Press. \nAnthony Cody is the author of Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn\, April 2020)\, winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Contest selected by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge\, finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry \, and longlisted for the PEN America / Jean Stein Book Award. He is a 2020 Poets & Writers debut poet and a 2020 Southwest Book Award winner from the Border Regional Library Association. A CantoMundo fellow from Fresno\, California\, Anthony has lineage in both the Bracero Program and the Dust Bowl. His poetry has appeared in The Academy of American Poets: Poem-A-Day\, Gulf Coast\, Ninth Letter\, Prairie Schooner\, TriQuarterly\, The Boiler\, ctrl+v journal\, among others. Anthony is a member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle where he co-edited How Do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology. He is a recent MFA-Creative Writing graduate from Fresno State where he continues to collaborate with Juan Felipe Herrera and the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio. Anthony has received fellowships from CantoMundo\, Community of Writers\, and Desert Nights\, Rising Stars Conference. Anthony won the inaugural 2020 CantoMundo Guzmán Mendoza / Paredez Fellowship for his work-in-progress poetry manuscript\, “The Rendering”\, selected by Aracelis Girmay. He serves as an associate poetry editor for Noemi Press and a poetry editor for Omnidawn. URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-barkin-dog-2-2021/ LOCATION:Zoom CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Feb2021SecondTuesdayHeader.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210112T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210112T203000 DTSTAMP:20260423T163645 CREATED:20201228T224251Z LAST-MODIFIED:20201228T224323Z UID:1882-1610478000-1610483400@www.mostpoetry.org SUMMARY:Second Tuesday @ Barkin’ Dog – On Zoom! DESCRIPTION:Please join the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and host Stella Beratlis as we present the first Second Tuesday Poetry reading of 2021! Helping us ring in this year are featured poets Sam Pereira and Dawn Trook\, followed by a dynamic open mic. \nSam Pereira is from Los Banos\, California; he received his Bachelor of Arts degree from California State University\, Fresno and his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa\, where he was a student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His books include The Marriage of the Portuguese (L’Epervier Press\, 1978)\, Brittle Water (Abattoir Editions/Penumbra Press\, University of Nebraska at Omaha\, 1987)\,[3] and A Cafe in Boca\, released in 2007 by Tebot Bach. In December\, 2020\, Nine Mile Press published Pereira’s seventh collection of poems\, True North and Untrue You. \nDawn Trook is a writer\, theater producer\, performer\, and educator. She teaches writing at UC Merced. Though she focuses on non-traditional methods of poetry distribution\, she has been published in The Rumpus\, Ms Magazine\, and several literary journals. \nJoin us at 7 via Zoom:  https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/99542317135 \nOpen mic signups at https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday URL:https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/second-tuesday-barkin-dog-jan-2021/ LOCATION:Zoom CATEGORIES:Open Mic,Readings,Second Tuesday ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://www.mostpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Jan2021SecondTuesdayHeader.png END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR