Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog
2020-01-14 18:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Barkin’ Dog Grill, 940 11th St, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
Join us for the Second Tuesday Barkin’ Dog reading on January 14th at 6:00 at the Barkin’ Dog Grill in downtown Modesto. An open mic will follow the featured reading, so bring a poem or two to share.

Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog
2020-02-11 18:00 - 20:00 | Barkin’ Dog Grill, 940 11th St, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
Join us for the Second Tuesday Barkin’ Dog reading on February 11th at 6:00 at the Barkin’ Dog Grill in downtown Modesto. Featured poets include Zaid Shlah. An open mic will follow the featured reading, so bring a poem or two to share.

Second Tuesday Series featuring Josh McKinney & Lisa Dominguez Abraham
2020-03-10 18:00 - 20:00 | Barkin’ Dog Grill, 940 11th St, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
Braid fresh flowers into your hair and perform pagan rituals as we ponder the newly-hatched world of SPRING.
Or you could just come to this poetry reading!
Join Modesto poet laureate Stella Beratlis as she presents featured poets Josh McKinney and Lisa Dominguez Abraham.
Joshua McKinney’s most recent book of poetry is Small Sillion (Parlor Press, 2019). His work has appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and many others. He is the recipient of The Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, The Dickinson Prize, The Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He is coeditor of the online ecopoetry zine, Clade Song. He teaches at California State University, Sacramento.
Lisa Dominguez Abraham’s poems have appeared in journals such as Southern Review, North American Review and Poetry East. Her collection Mata Hari Blows a Kiss won the 2016 Swan Scythe Chapbook Contest, and her book Coyote Logic came out from Blue Oak Press in February 2019. She works at Cosumnes River College.
Bring a poem to share during our open mic following the featured poets’ readings. Since it’s almost spring, let’s explore the themes darkness and light.

Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog - on Zoom!
2020-05-12 18:00 - 19:00
Save the date! We will be holding our Second Tuesday poetry reading series on May 12th, 2020, via Zoom. We hope you’ll join us. Check back here for more information soon, or email us at info@mostpoetry.org.

Second Tuesday Poetry: Ulalume González de León
2020-05-12 18:00 - 19:30
Join the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center via Zoom on the second Tuesday in May to celebrate the publication of Ulalume González de León’s PLAGIOS/PLAGIARISMS VOL. 1, with project translators Terry Ehret, John Johnson, and Nancy J. Morales.
Poet, essayist, and translator Ulalume González de León believed that “Everything has already been said,” and, thus, that each act of creation is a rewriting, reshuffling, and reconstructing of one great work. For this reason, she chose the title Plagios (Plagiarisms) for her book of collected poems. Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz called Ulalume González de León “the best Mexicana poet since Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” recognizing the visionary quality of her work.
Plagios (Plagiarisms), just out this year from Sixteen Rivers Press, is the first of three bilingual volumes of González de León’s work. This first volume presents several short collections of poems González de León produced from 1968 to 1971, each of which explores the ephemeral nature of identity and its dependence on the ever-shifting ground of language and memory.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
Terry 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.
Nancy 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.
John Johnson’s poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Boxcar Poetry Review, Clade Song, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Web Conjunctions. He is a long-time student of the Spanish language and has studied letter-press printing with Iota Press of Sebastopol, producing chapbooks and bilingual broadsides.
Zoom at 6 pm:
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Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog - On Zoom!
2020-06-09 18:00 - 19:30
We will be holding our Second Tuesday poetry reading series on June 9th, 2020, via Zoom. We hope you’ll join us. Please see the flyer above for more information on our featured poets, Karen Terrey and Dane Cervine.

Second Tuesday @ Barkin’ Dog – On Zoom!
2020-07-14 18:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
We will be holding our Second Tuesday poetry reading series on July 14th, 2020, via Zoom. We hope you’ll join us. Please see the flyer above for more information on our featured poets, Connie Post and Michael Meyerhofer.
Live links for reading here:
For the open mic: https://padlet.com/beratliss/j0ynareusug2u61c
For the Zoom reading: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/99196095308

Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog - on Zoom!
2020-08-11 18:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
We will be holding our Second Tuesday poetry reading series on August 11th, 2020, via Zoom. We hope you’ll join us. Featured readers are Jeanne Wagner and TBA. Sign up for our newsletter to receive our email blast with announcements.
ZOOM INFO:
Topic: Second Tuesday Poetry with Jeanne Wagner and Sara Coito
Time: Aug 11, 2020 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/96637283440
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Second Tuesday Poetry with the Meter Maids
2020-09-08 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
Join us this month as we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the local writing group The Meter Maids, featuring members of the group reading their work. Open mic following featured readers. NOTE: 7 pm start time.
Below is a history of the Meter Maids:
What began as a sharing of poetry between two women who worked with the committee that brought the 20th Anniversary of Earth Day to Modesto in April 1990 inspired one to reach out to other friends who wrote and loved poetry.
The group gathered monthly at various homes and remained nameless for many, many years, welcoming a few men and many women into its fold. Eventually, the group evolved into an ever-changing, nurturing sisterhood, whose members have ranged in age from 16 to 80 and included two mother-daughter partners. One daughter, the 16-year-old, is grown, married and continues to meet with us from New York on Zoom with her infant son on her lap.
The structure of our monthly meetings departs from most poetry groups, which usually write independently and bring poems to be read, critiqued and enjoyed. We are not designed as a critique group, but critique does happen. We are not a therapy group, but we do support one another through our personal challenges. We share a common love of poetry and passion for writing.
Over the years the group has developed a tradition of staring each meeting with an afternoon “tea” schmooze during which members catch up with one another, share our lives, gather words or suggest prompts, then write and share. The tradition includes sharing the fun of writing and creating around such monthly prompts as fortune cookie Monday in January; hearts; MLK; dead presidents in February; Women’s History in March’ the four seasons at solstices and equinoxes; Cinco de Mayo in May, Stone Soup; pumpkins, ghosts and goblins in October; Dia de los Muertos and Thanksgiving in November; and the many, many holidays in December.
Over the past 30 years, three chap books have been published, and a 30-Year- Anniversary book featuring poetry submitted by members past and present will go to press very soon, thanks to the talented and dedicated work of one of our original founding members, Karen Baker.
We share these samplings of our poetry with gratitude for the talented community of poets both in Meter Maids and in the Modesto area. We are pleased that members who have moved away to new adventures can join our Zoom meetings during this quarantine year and beyond.
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Meeting ID: 977 8229 7419

Second Tuesday @ Barkin’ Dog – on Zoom!
2020-09-24 08:00 - 17:00
Join host Stella Beratlis in our monthly reading + open mic series. This month we are excited to feature Eliot Schain, author of THE DISTANT SHORE, and Patrick Cahill, author of THE MACHINERY OF SLEEP.
Patrick Cahill’s prose and poems have appeared in over forty journals, including TriQuarterly, Volt, Poets Eleven, the Irish magazine Into the Void, Subprimal, and Eclectica. His poems have twice won the Central Coast Writers Award. He is a cofounder and editor of Ambush Review, a San Francisco–based literary and arts journal and was a contributing editor for the Sonoma County anthology Digging Our Poetic Roots. Patrick received his Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz and wrote a study of Whitman and visual experience in nineteenth-century America. Portions of this work have appeared in The Daguerreian Annual and Left Curve.
Eliot Schain’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Santa Monica Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and Miramar, among other journals, as well as in three anthologies: The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed, Christopher Buckley and Gary Young’s Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California, and America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience. Schain’s books include American Romance from Zeitgeist Press and Westering Angels from Small Poetry Press. He has served as program director for the Poetry Society of America, has taught high school, and now works as a psychotherapist. A proud member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, he lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Mary.

Open mic follows: sign up in advance (10 slot available): https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday
Zoom: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/91739636824
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Second Tuesday @ Barkin’ Dog – on Zoom!
2020-11-10 19:00 - 20:30 | Zoom
Join us for the NOVEMBER installment of the Second Tuesday Poetry series on November 10th at 7:00 pm, hosted by Stella Beratlis. We are pleased to feature poets Aideed Medina of Fresno and Jon Grammatico of Modesto.

Aideed Medina, poet and spoken word artist, creates and performs poetry in English, or Spanish, as dictated by the inspiration of each individual piece. She enjoys mentoring high school students under the direction of the Fresno Poet Laureate, Bryan Medina, with the Poetry Out Loud Program, and for youth slam competitions throughout the California central valley. She was honored to be the 2017 Representative for the Loud Mouth Poetry Slam of Visalia, CA at the Women of the World Poetry Slam DTX, and recently received the 2017 Fresno Arts Council Horizon Award for her contributions to the city’s artistic and cultural scene in the category of individual artist. She is currently working on her first two manuscripts, “A California Dime” and “Mis Papelitos.” Her work has appeared in Revista Literaria Austral, Fresno State’s Club Austral literary magazine and Flies, Cockroaches and Poets, the Chicano Writers and Artists Association journal. Online she has work on La Bloga, Poets Responding, Art of the Commune: La comuna, and as part of a collection of original art songs composed for The Opera Remix, Fresno Grand Opera.
Jon Grammatico has been writing poems since his high school days but began reading at local open mics last year. Jon received his Bachelor of Arts in Gender Studies and his Master of Social Work from Stanislaus State. He currently works as a social worker with Stanislaus County in the Public Health Department, functioning as the HIV/AIDS program coordinator and is the recently elected President of MoPride, the leading LGBTQ+ organization in Stanislaus county. When he is not writing, Jon spends his time tending to his 30+ house plants, caring for his two cats and dog, and listening to music. He currently lives in Turlock, CA with his partner.
Zoom link: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/99171810028
Open mic following the featured readers; sign up here: https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday

Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog - On Zoom!
2020-12-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Zoom
The MODESTO-STANISLAUS POETRY CENTER and your host Stella Beratlis are pleased to welcome Odilia Galván Rodríguez and Meg Withers for Second Tuesday Poetry on December 8, 2020. Join the reading via Zoom at 7 pm: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/91826874769

Odilia Galván Rodríguez is a poet, writer, editor, publisher, and social justice activist, the author of six volumes of poetry. Her latest is The Color of Light, FlowerSong Books, 2019. She is a long-time community organizer and volunteer and has been the editor for Matrix Women’s News Magazine, Community Murals Magazine and Tricontinental Magazine in Havana, Cuba. She currently edits two journals: Cloud Women’s Quarterly and Anacua Literary Arts.
Galván Rodríguez co-founded the Facebook page “Poets Responding,” and co-authored the groundbreaking, award winning anthology, Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, University of Arizona Press. Her poetry and writings have appeared in numerous anthologies, and literary journals. She is a practitioner of Indigenous Spiritual and Healing Traditions and strives to live a simple life based on the indigenous worldview of her ancestors.

Meg Withers has been writing to save her sanity since she was about 9. She has been published in literary journals and other creative projects. She has been anthologized, and has three published books: Must Be Present to Win (Ghost Road 2005), A Communion of Saints (TinFish 2008), and Shadowed: Unheard Voices (Press at Fresno State 2014).
Her fourth book, Particular Odyssey: In Search, is forthcoming from Prickly Pear Press, and is likely to be published in 2021, barring the unforeseen circumstances of life these days. The basis for Meg’s work is concern with the attempt to silence voices.
Open mic follows the featured readers. Please sign up in advance at https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday.

Second Tuesday @ Barkin’ Dog – On Zoom!
2021-01-12 19:00 - 20:30 | Zoom
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.
Sam 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.
Dawn 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.
Join us at 7 via Zoom: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/99542317135
Open mic signups at https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday

Second Tuesday @ Barkin' Dog - on Zoom!
2021-02-09 19:00 - 20:30 | Zoom
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
Open Mic signup: https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday

Josiah 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.
Anthony 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second Tuesday Poetry Reading with Nicca Ray and Michelle Cernuto
2021-08-10 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
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.

Zoom: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/91909197367
Open mic signup: https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday

NICCA RAY
Nicca 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.”

Nicca 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.
Nicca is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a 2020 Acker Award recipient.

MICHELLE CERNUTO
Michelle 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.

“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)

“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)

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Second Tuesday Poetry Reading
2021-09-14 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
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!

Topic: Second Tuesday Reading: Poetry Localpalooza
Time: Sep 14, 2021 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/95590128285

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

Second Tuesday Poetry Reading featuring Cristina Sandoval & Manny Moreno
2021-11-09 19:00 - 20:00 | Google Meet
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.‌ ‌
Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/yzr-effe-nrh
Otherwise, to join by phone, dial +1 760-654-5100 and enter this PIN: 914 592 889#

Sign up for Open Mic: https://forms.gle/v8J9cK9RXn4YDwwc9
CRISTINA SANDOVAL
Cristina 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!
MANNY MONOLIN
Monolin “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.
His 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.
Manny 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.
ACCESS THE READING:
Google Meet: To join the video meeting, click this link: meet.google.com/yzr-effe-nrh
To join by phone instead, dial (US) +1 760-654-5100 and enter this PIN: 914 592 889#
More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/yzr-effe-nrh?pin=8948151384183

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

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Erin Rodoni & Dana Koster
2022-01-11 19:00 - 20:00
The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center invites you to the first Second Tuesday Poetry reading of 2022, featuring Erin Rodoni and Dana Koster.
When: Tuesday, January 11, 2022 at 7 pm PST
Where: Zoom (RSVP https://tinyurl.com/4c3byekj)

ERIN RODONI
Erin 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.
And 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.
“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
DANA KOSTER
Dana 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.
Dana’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.
“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.”
—John Shoptaw, author of Times Beach

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Kelly Cressio-Moeller & John Sibley Williams
2022-02-08 19:00 - 20:00
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.
Tuesday, February 8, 2022
7 pm PST
RSVP for Zoom
Sign up for open mic (3 mins per reader)
Kelly Cressio-Moeller
Kelly 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
John Sibley Williams
John 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.

Second Tuesday Poetry presents Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets Reading
2022-03-08 19:00 - 20:00
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.
With open mic following the featured poets; 3 minutes per reader.
When: Tuesday, March 8, 2022 at 7 pm PST
Where: Zoom (RSVP in advance for link: https://tinyurl.com/4c3byekj)
Link for open mic signup: https://forms.gle/xVfDF4hUx89REVmq7

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring the poetry of Mexican poet Ulalume González de León
2022-04-12 19:00 - 20:00
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry, featuring the poetry of Mexican poet Ulalume González de León from Plagiarisms/Plagios Vol. 2
with translators Terry Ehret &Nancy J. Morales and guest poet-translator William O’Daly.
Hosted by Stella Beratlis
Zoom–RSVP required: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYvdu-oqDktGNSizk4tQoG2D1gD0ynwn0CD. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Open mic signup link (3 min per poet): https://forms.gle/PHW4ixpkG3U3zwJk8
About Ulalume González de León

Ulalume 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.
While 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.
In 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.
About the Translators
Terry 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.
Nancy 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.
About William O’Daly
William O’Daly is co-founder of Copper Canyon Press and a noted Neruda translator.

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

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

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

Second Tuesday Poetry with Clay Hunt and Briana Muñoz
2022-06-14 19:00 - 20:00
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry, featuring Clay Hunt and Briana Muñoz, hosted by Stella Beratlis.
Tuesday, June 14, 2022
7:00 pm PST w/ open mic
on Zoom–RSVP required: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcvcOqvrz8pG9Yi9Z0cV9-AoGodS4mymh-Q
RSVP Open Mic (3 min per poet): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSezxMg1qBq4z4NyNQWRckkONw_hR-JWWJ8HsJ__XjSDKx34GA/viewform

Briana Muñoz
Briana 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.
Briana 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.
About Everything is Returned to the Soil/ Todo Vuelve a la Tierra:
Everything 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.
https://linktr.ee/Awomanofwords
Links to purchase books: https://www.flowersongpress.com/store/p/everythingisreturnedtothesoil
https://www.pricklypearpublishing.com/shop/loose-lips
Clay Hunt
Clay 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.
Young When the Sun Went Down chapbook can be found at Budgetpress.net
Email: Chuntjr89@gmail.com
Instragram: @claytanic89

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Linda Scheller & Zubair Ahmed
2022-07-12 19:00 - 20:00
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry, featuring Zubair Ahmed and Linda Scheller
Date: Tuesday, July 12, 2022
Time: 7:00 pm PST
RSVP for Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZArcu6oqD4sGNDZmBo6MV6JoEG46YsUVpYJ

Linda Scheller
Linda 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.
“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
“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
“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
For more information and links to publications, please go to lindascheller.com.
Zubair Ahmed
Zubair 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.
