Join us at McHenry Museum on Sunday, June 4 at 1 pm for a reading featuring the winners of the 2023 Poet’s Corner Contest, sponsored by the City of Modesto.
For contest information, please visit the City of Modesto Poet’s Corner page. (Contest info will be updated soon.)
We are so excited to feature Rooja Mohassessy and Farnaz Fatemi for our Second Tuesday reading in March.
Please RSVP to get Zoom link for reading: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYucOmqrzIrGdb0wNX9dF4OQqZv7IRjNEOT
Hosted by Modesto poet laureate emeritus Stella Beratlis; open mic follows featured poets. (Open mic sign-up.)
Rooja Mohassessy 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.
“When Your Sky Runs Into Mine is a stunning debut collection … about personal revolution, the turning toward art in times of suffering, the claiming of a rich cultural heritage.”—Ellen Bass, author of Indigo
“Rooja Mohassessy’s debut collection belies any notion of a first book. It is a work of expansive vision and formal achievement, sounding an assured and unforgettable voice in poetry. “ —Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone
Mohassessy’s intellectual power and penchant for image stand out in beautiful ways in this debut collection. She displays a painterly use of color, texture, and image that reflects her striking awareness of the physical world. Her capacity for efficient and elegant syntax and her fierce intelligence when dealing with political subjects and subjects of the female body in this world, constitute a most welcome addition to American poetry. This is a very impressive debut collection by a most promising poet.” —Kwame Dawes, author of UnHistory with John Kinsella
Farnaz Fatemi, 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.
“Delicious, provocative, and incredibly wise, Farnaz Fatemi transcends years and oceans in these pages. Like gripping a cup and string to the ear, Sister Tongue is a hopeful missive, proof of words and their witnesses, an atlas of the wonder of becoming.”—T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
“Poet Farnaz Fatemi is the soulful Iranian American truth-teller and wonder-wanderer we’ve needed to hear. In Farsi, in English, in Tehran, or California, these poems cherish the miracle of connectedness by weaving family threads through time and space—through sisters, mothers, grandmothers, through a changed and changing world. Sister Tongue is a luscious love letter to language(s), spoken in a trusting, intimate voice. The poet recognizes the twinned solace of silence and song, of sister and self. Loss takes its seat, as it does, at the table, and Fatemi, with tea, family history, powerful memory, and a new/old tongue, inscribes it alongside the depths of beauty and joy in this radiant book of passionate understanding.”—Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum
“I praise the present tense of these poems for its tensile strength, its ability to hold the struggle that is happening in the past, present, and future. The way it speaks of the perpetual, of what it is to be tongue-tied in the presence of one’s other self. ‘Language is geological,’ this speaker tells us, ‘a process of accumulation, and accretion accompanied by landslides.’ In setting out to speak the language of her blood, she finds herself at once estranged and embraced. Thrilled and defeated. What to do with such a natural disaster? These poems persist in their attempts to bridge worlds, offering hope of a complex and hard-won reconciliation, one richly crafted line at a time. In the words of Fatemi, ‘I want the foreigner in me / to meet the foreigner in me.’”—Danusha Laméris, author of Bonfire Opera“
Sister Tongue, Farnaz Fatemi’s debut poetry collection, transports us to a place where language must stretch to fit the largeness of human love and longing, and in doing so, fills the absences we did not even know we harbored. Sister Tongue begins to say what many of us already know—that borders and countries are too limiting to define us. Her poems offer us both a reckoning and a salve.”—Persis M. Karim, chair of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University
Please check our YOUTH POET LAUREATE Contest page for all the details plus application.
Applications for the 2023 Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate open January 1, 2023!
Are you a teen? Are you SUPER into poetry? We want to hear from you!
Introducing the Inaugural process to choose a Youth Poet Laureate for Stanislaus County!
Teens ages 15–19 who reside or go to school in Stanislaus County may submit up to five original works of poetry demonstrating their commitment to the mastery of the art and craft of poetry.
RULES:
● Poems may be in any style or form.
● You must submit at least 3 poems but no more than five poems.
● Poems must be the original creative work of the poet. Plagiarism will result in immediate disqualification from this and all future Youth Poet Laureate opportunities.
● All poems must be typed. Single or double spaced, 12 pt Times New Roman preferred unless the poem’s form dictates the format (example: blackout poetry, erasures, visual poetry, spoken word, etc.)
● Brief artist statement/biography describing why you want to be a Youth Poet Laureate. Who inspired you to write poetry?
● No gratuitous violence or sexual content. No hate speech. No slander.
Submission Dates:
SUBMIT APPLICATION
JANUARY 1 – FEBRUARY 27, 2023.
Email PDF application and poem attachment per instructions on application.
IF SELECTED, POET:
AILEEN JAFFA YOUNG POETS CONTEST
Co-sponsored by MoSt (Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center) and the National League of American Penwomen (NLAPW), Modesto chapter.
This contest is offered as a means of encouraging young writers throughout Stanislaus County and as a way to remember poet Aileen Jaffa, the founding President of the Poets of the San Joaquin and member of the Modesto Branch of the National League of American Pen Women.
Awards and Recognition
First, second and third place winners in each category will receive cash awards from the MoSt Poetry Center. Prizes are: First Place $25, Second Place $15, Third Place $10. In addition, the Modesto Branch of the National League of American Pen Women will award a $60 Aileen Jaffa Outstanding Poem award in each of two combined categories, Categories 1 and 2, and Categories 3 and 4.
The current president of the NLAPW Modesto chapter will present the awards, and the winning poems will be read at an Awards Ceremony at 2 P.M. on Saturday May 13, 2023 at the Carnegie Arts Center, 250 N. Broadway, Turlock.
For more information, contact info@mostpoetry.org
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Tamer Mostafa and Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
Hosted by Stella Beratlis
Date: Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2023
Time: 7:00 pm PST
RSVP for Zoom link
Open Mic Signup: https://forms.gle/d51j2WqGmBrzrTLT9. 3 mins per reader, please.
TAMER MOSTAFA
Tamer Said Mostafa (pronouns: he/him/his), a radical social worker by day and poet by night, is a Stockton, California native whose poetry has appeared in over twenty literary journals and magazines, including Confrontation, Zone 3, and Freezeray. Tamer is a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee whose debut full-length book of poetry, Where Will I Find America? was released in August, 2021 and is available online. He is also the author of Which Way Will the Water Drag Our Bodies, published in 2020.Mostafa is a graduate of the Creative Writing program at University of California, Davis where he won the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Contest for Poetry. As an Arab-American Muslim, Tamer lives life through spirituality, community work, and the music of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony.
CAROL LYNN STEVENSON GRELLAS
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas lives in the Sierra Foothills and is a recent graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Writing program, where she received a Merit Scholarship. She is an eleven-time Pushcart Prize nominee and an eight-time Best of the Net nominee. In 2012 she won the Red Ochre Chapbook Contest, with her manuscript, Before I Go to Sleep. In 2018 her book In the Making of Goodbyes was nominated for The CLMP Firecracker Award in Poetry, and her poem A Mall in California took 2nd place for the Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize. In 2019 her chapbook An Ode to Hope in the Midst of Pandemonium was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards and Epitaph for the Beloved was nominated for The Northern California Book Award. Her latest collection of poems, Alice in Ruby Slippers, was short-listed for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize and awarded honorable mention in the Poetry category. You can find out more about Carol Lynn’s work by visiting her website: https://www.clgrellaspoetry.com/
