“The Poem Heard in Plain Sight” MoSt Poetry Summer Workshop w/ Guest Artist Tama L. Brisbane

THE POEM HEARD IN PLAIN SIGHT

1:00-3:00 p.m. Saturday, August 31st, 2024 in the downtown Modesto Library

With a little discipline, your poem can make a declaration and a difference! Join August’s Guest Artist Tama L. Brisbane, author, Stockton Poet Laureate Emerita, and coach of over 15 national youth slam teams. From the opening ice-breaker to performance tips to the final printed page, this workshop is all about poetry being visible as well as audible. It will also be super-fun! Join us! Free and open to the public!

Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Susan Cohen & Lenore Weiss

Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is proud to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Susan Cohen & Lenore Weiss

Date: Tuesday, August 13, 2024
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Roseburg, Modesto CA 95350 (Roseburg Square Shopping Center)

Open mic following featured poets (3 min per poet); sign up at the event. 

 

Susan Cohen 

Black & white photo of Susan CohenSusan Cohen’s third collection, Democracy of Fire (Broadstone Books: 2022), was praised by Ellen Bass as a “wise and wonderful” vision of “our interconnectedness.” Her poetry honors include the Red Wheelbarrow Prize judged by Mark Doty, the Terrain Annual Poetry Prize judged by Arthur Sze, and a special mention in Pushcart Prize XLIII.  A former journalist and contributing writer for the Washington Post Magazine, she lives in Berkeley and has appeared in 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Verse Daily, and many anthologies.

Praise for Susan Cohen & Democracy of Fire

Cover of Democracy of Fire, featuring illustration of trees against a background of red sky. 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

 At this historical, political and ecological moment, with democracy and our earth aflame, could there be a more timely or relevant collection than Susan Cohen’s powerful, wise and deeply humane book of poetry, Democracy of Fire? Here, the many losses we experience both daily and across time—losses both cultural and personal—are mitigated by the act of memory and a faith in, well, the facts of our world and our capacity for intimate reckonings. Once again, Susan Cohen has shown herself to be one of the most compassionate recorders of our complicated times. —David St. John, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets & author of The Last Troubadour: Selected and New Poems

Lenore Weiss

Color image of Lenore Weiss wearing a black coat with buttons across the front. Lenore’s past poetry collections form a trilogy about love, loss, and being mortal: Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island (West End Press, 2012); Two Places (Kelsay Books, 2014), and The Golem (Hakodesh Word Press, 2017). Her most recent collection, Video Game Pointers (WordTech Editions, 2024) issues a call for peace. Ethelzine published her hand-sewn poetry chapbook, From Malls to Museums. Alexandria Quarterly Press published her prize-winning flash fiction chapbook, Holding on to the Fringes of Love. 

Lenore serves as the Associate Editor (Creative Nonfiction) for the Mud Season Review and lives in Oakland, California with Zebra the Brave and Granola the Shy. She earned an MFA in fiction from San Francisco State University. You may find her at www.lenoreweiss.com. 

Praise for Lenore Weiss and Video Game Pointers

Cover of Video Game Pointers“This mighty collection features limbs of a radical mass autobiography. Our aggregate imagination wedded to virtuosic architecture of wordplay and image. Through these poems, quilted revolutionary legacies of resistance find their best song.”—Tongo Eisen-Martin, 8th Poet Laureate of San Francisco, California

“This generous volume stretches the expansive geography of the author’s imagination, time, space, experience and world view. Weiss is a practitioner of the politics of being fully alive.”—Maw Shein Win, Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn)

MoSt Poetry on Saturday featuring Christina Lux, Kim McMillon, & Salvatore Salerno

MoSt Poetry On Saturday Reading

August 17, 2024 at 2:00 p.m. PST

Carnegie Arts Center           250 N. Broadway Avenue, Turlock, CA

Join host Gary Thomas for the latest edition of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center’s (MoSt’s) Poetry On Saturday in-person readings on August 17 at 2:00 p.m. at the Carnegie Arts Center in Turlock. Come enjoy some high-quality summertime respite and restoration via three fine poets’ words!

Our featured readers are Christina Lux, Kim McMillon, and Salvatore Salerno.  An Open Mic time will follow the featured poets. For more details on the poets and their books, read their accompanying bios.

This event is free and open to the public, and light refreshments will be provided.

 

Christina Lux’s poetry has appeared on National Public Radio, in the Houston Chronicle, in textbooks by Oxford University Press, and in journals such as Women’s Studies Quarterly and North Dakota Quarterly.  Her book of poems, War Bonds, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press. Born in Pasadena, California, she lived in the Central Valley of California for several years before moving to Texas, then Québec, and finally spending five years in Cameroon, where she lived in the Bui Division of the Northwest Province as well as in Yaoundé before returning to the U.S. for university. She holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages from the University of Oregon and is currently Managing Director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of California,  Merced.

 

Dr. Kim McMillon is a producer, playwright, and contributor to the anthology Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka (Ohio University Press, 2021). McMillon is the editor of Willow Books’ anthology Black Fire—This Time, published March 15, 2022. McMillon produced the 2016 Dillard University-Harvard Hutchins Center Black Arts Movement  Conference in New Orleans. With UC Merced’s Center for the Humanities, ASUCM, and the Office of Student Life, Ms. McMillon co-produced the 2014 UC Merced Black Arts Movement Conference, Fifty Years On. McMillon edited the April 2018 special edition of The Journal of PAN African Studies on the Black Arts Movement and contributed a chapter on the Black Arts Movement to the Black Power Encyclopedia (1965-1975). This two-volume reference work explores the emergence and evolution of the Black Power Movement in the United States. McMillon produced, wrote, and starred in her one-woman show, Confessions of a Thespian: When Spirit & Theatre Collide, directed by Margo Hall and staged at the Julia Morgan Theatre in Berkeley, CA, in March 2000. McMillon also produced, wrote, and directed Voyages, which premiered at the Nova Theatre in San Francisco in March 1986 and was produced at Zellerbach Playhouse in August 1987. In January 1988, Berkeley’s Black Repertory Group produced Voyages.  Dr. McMillon’s children’s book, The Healing Book of Me, will be available in late 2024.

Salvatore Salerno has an M.F.A. from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He was a poet and playwright in the North Carolina Visiting Artist Program.  Salvatore is a retired English and drama teacher from Davis High School.  He was the Poet Laureate of Modesto from 2020-24 and is still the president of Stanislaus Audubon Society.  His sixth poetry book is After Thoughts.

MoSt Summer Poetry Workshop–Monsters, Villains, & a Disaster or Two: Writing About the Scary Stuff

Our July 20th MoSt Summer Poetry Workshop offers participants the opportunity to write about scary subject matter with facilitator Gillian Wegener. Please join us at the Modesto Library on Saturday, 7/20/24 at 1:00 p.m. for this free workshop open to all members of the public, from novice to experienced poet and everything in-between.

Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate Reception & Reading

Join us on Saturday, August 3, 2024 from 2-3 pm at the Carnegie Arts Center as we celebrate our incoming Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate.

Welcome our new laureate, Zoe Byron of Oakdale, and bid a fond farewell to our inaugural laureate,  Faith Delgado of Turlock.  With readings and refreshments.

At The Loft, 3rd floor of the Carnegie Arts Center,

The Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate program is a partnership between Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center, Stanislaus County Library, Stanislaus County Office of Education, MJC’s School of Language Arts and Education, and the Stanislaus Library Foundation.