Poetry On Saturday: Andrena Zawinski and Susie Meserve

Carnegie Arts Center

250 North Broadway Avenue, Turlock, California

            Join host Gary Thomas for the latest edition of MoSt’s Poetry On Saturday readings in person on February 11 at 2:00 p.m. at the Carnegie Arts Center in Turlock.  Our featured readers are Andrena Zawinski and Susie Meserve from the Bay Area, followed by our Open Mic time following the featured poets. This event is free and open to the public, and light refreshments will be provided.

Andrena Zawinski is a veteran teacher of writing Jack Hirschman called “an activist poet whose works open up paths of struggle, celebration, revolutionary victories.”  About her fourth full-length poetry collection, Born Under the Influence, Mary Mackey lauds the poems as “tough, smart, beautifully crafted” and Michael Simms says, “we are lucky to have this poet among us.”  Her work has appeared in Blue Collar Review, CQ, Plainsongs, Progressive Magazine, Rattle, and more, and is widely anthologized, including Crossing Class, Lawrence Ferlinghetti Tribute, Raising Lilly Ledbetter, Women Write Resistance, and others with awards from Akron Art Museum, International Human Rights Creators of Justice, Ventura County Poetry Project, Emily Stauffer Poetry Prize, Kenneth Patchen Poetry Prize, and PEN Oakland Award.  She was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, but has made her home in the San Francisco Bay Area. To find out more about Andrena’s latest book, visit:   https://www.wordpoetrybooks.com/zawinski.html

Born and raised in New England, Susie Meserve is the author of the poetry collection Little Prayers, which won a Blue Light Award from Blue Light Press and was published in 2018.  She is also the author of the chapbook Faith.  Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Salon, ElleThe Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Gulf Coast, Salamander, and more.  She lives in northern California with her family.

 

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Brad Buchanan and Susan Cohen

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.

RSVP for Zoom link

Open  Mic Signup: https://forms.gle/d51j2WqGmBrzrTLT9. 3 minutes per reader, please. 

SUSAN COHEN

Susan 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, 

Susan’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.

Susan’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).

About Democracy of Fire

A thread of elegy runs through Democracy of Fire, Susan Cohen’s wise and wonderful new poetry collection. Tenderly, precisely, these poems record a litany of the world’s ongoing losses: “Greenland’s ice sheet pooling like tears into the ocean,” elephants, beetles, democracies, “languages left behind like cloaks,” and “our own bones interred without ceremony.” Cohen shows us our interconnectedness, a reminder of both the beauty and value of what’s at stake. Yet, paradoxically, this vision makes Democracy of Fire a deeply comforting book. Of the planet Mercury she writes, “…a pinprick ablaze for longer than our species will exist…Between us and it, there’s a distance far beyond air, and beyond despair.”

—Ellen Bass, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets & author of Indigo

 

Brad Buchanan

Brad 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.

About CHIMERA

Brad 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.

–Susan Kelly-DeWitt, author of SPIDER SEASON (Cold River Press, 2016) and GRAVITATIONAL TUG (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2020)

 

Register in advance for this reading:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIkc-uopzIiE9CmsJAOxm1JzNtUdnMXYXqN

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Book Discussion: Lee Herrick’s Scar & Flower

Join us at the Modesto Library to discuss Lee’s collection Scar and Flower. Copies available at the service desk at the downtown library. You don’t need to have read the book to join us!

11th Annual Poetry Festival with Amanda Moore

Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center (MoSt) will host the 11th Annual Poetry Festival on February 4, 2023 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 1528 Oakdale Road, Modesto, California. The event will run from 9 am to 1:30 pm.   

Facilitated by Amanda Moore, an awarded-winning, nationally recognized poet from the Bay Area, attendees will be led through a program titled At the Starting Line, A Workshop on Poetic Opening, which promises to be very helpful for both new and experienced poets.   

Tickets ($40 each) for the event are available through Eventbrite.  Attendance is limited to the first 44 people who purchase tickets. Coffee, tea, and table snacks will be provided, and attendees are welcome to bring their own lunch. As in the past, the festival will include an author’s table and camaraderie with poets and poetry aficionados from throughout Northern California.  Eventbrite link for tickets: https://most2023fest.eventbrite.com 

About Our Workshop Facilitator, Amanda Moore  

Amanda Moore’s debut collection of poetryRequeening, was selected for the 2020 National Poetry Series by Ocean Vuong and published by HarperCollins/Ecco in October 2021. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Best New PoetsZZYZVA, and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting, and her essays have appeared in The Baltimore ReviewHippocampus Magazine, and on the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s blog. She is the recipient of writing awards, residencies, and fellowships from The Brown Handler Residency, In Cahoots, The Writers Grotto, The Writing Salon, Brush Creek Arts Foundation, and The Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts.   

Poetry Co-editor at Women’s Voices for Change and a reader at VIDA Review and INCH, Amanda is a high school English teacher and lives by the beach in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco with her husband and daughter. https://amandapmoore.com

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Beverly Burch and Linda Marie Prather

Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry, featuring Beverly Burch and Linda Marie Prather. Hosted by Modesto poet laureate emeritus Stella Beratlis. 

Date: Tuesday, Dec 13, 2022
Time: 7:00 pm PST
RSVP for Zoom link

Open mic follows featured readers. Please sign up and plan to read for about 3 minutes.

Beverly Burch

Beverly 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. 

About Leave Me a Little Want

“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.”

-Julia Levine, Ordinary Psalms

Linda Maria Prather 

Linda 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.

Her poetry appears in More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets. Linda’s published
widely and received prizes from Penumbra, Poets’ Dinner Contest, and the Ina Coolbrith Circle. She has won
the 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.