Young poets: Don’t forget to apply for the Youth Poet Laureate contest by January 27, 2024. Open to poets ages 15-19 who live or attend school in Stanislaus County and who will reside in the area through the youth poet laureate term (June 1, 2024 – May 31, 2025). All details at the Youth Poet Laureate contest page.
Deadline is 11:59 pm on Saturday, January 27, 2024.
MoSt Poetry Festival
Saturday, February 3, 2024
“Writing the Way Through Wild Spaces”
Workshop leader: Maya Khosla, Wildlife Biologist, Poet, Filmmaker
Carnegie Arts Center 250 N. Broadway Turlock, CA
10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
Doors open at 9:30 a.m. — continental breakfast included
$40 RSVP at https://poetryfestival12.eventbrite.com
Maya Khosla is a biologist and writer. As Sonoma County Poet Laureate (2018-2020), she brought Sonoma’s communities together to heal through gatherings, field walks, and shared writing after the recent wildfires. Her books include “All the Fires of Wind and Light” (Sixteen Rivers Press; 2020 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award), “Keel Bone” (Bear Star Press; Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize). She is the winner of the 2023 Fund for Wild Nature Grassroots Activist Award and co-winner of the Environmentalist of the Year Award from 2020 Sonoma County Conservation Council (SCCC). Her work has been featured in For the Wild, her writing was part of the award-winning documentary films including “Village of Dust, City of Water,” about the water crises in rural India.
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MoSt Poetry members are cordially invited to read at this special open mic poetry reading on Thursday, December 14th at The Dragonfly Art for Life, 1210 J Street in downtown Modesto, CA. Free and open to the public, the event starts at 6:00 p.m. If you haven’t yet become a MoSt member and would like to help support poetry in Stanislaus County, please go to mostpoetry.org.
Speak Your Silence is a reading on December 16, 2023 at the Turlock Library in remembrance of Sandy Hook (Dec. 14 is the Sandy Hook Day of Remembrance).
Speak Your Silence, a student-led campaign organized by Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate Faith Delgado, is intended to address and combat all types of violence that occurs in the schools. Youth poets are invited to share their stories and/or experiences in the form of poetry, slam poetry, speeches, spoken word, etc. This can be about sexual or physical violence, any kind of bullying, and/or your experience of how the school handled it. work on the topic of school violence. For middle- and high-schoolers; original work please.
“The late W.S. Merwin might as well have been called Merlin, for the seemingly magical changes of his work during his long career. The poems in Present Company are like impressionist or even abstract paintings. If you scan them quickly, they will seem to be out of focus, but if you read more slowly, stopping and lingering, your patience will be rewarded by their beauty.”
