Date: Tuesday, July 9, 2024
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: The Artist Lab at Prospect Theater Project, 1214 K Street, Modesto CA 95354

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

Hosted by Gillian Wegener

Monolin “Manny” Moreno 

Monolin “Manny” Moreno is of Yaqui-Tarascan descent and an Enrolled Member of the State Recognized Tribal Group of the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians. His five published works include poetry collections, memoirs, and a remembrance of Native elders Harry Jack and Barry Beaver Turner. 

His poems have appeared in Song of the San Joaquin, Hincha Poesia and Whispering Thunder.  He was a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2011 and was Poet of the Month for Moon Tide Press in 2012.

Moreno is a Sundancer and member of the Black Wolf Honor Society  Gourd Clan and Native American Church. Manny was brought out and introduced as a community elder at a pow-wow in Stockton CA, and he has served the Native community as a spiritual leader. 

Manny’s newest book, Santa Nella Blues, was just published earlier this year and was created with support and funding from The Heartland Creative Corps, California Arts Council, Merced United Way, and the Merced County Art Council.

Lillian Vallee

Lillian Vallee is an award-winning translator, writer and scholar who served an apprenticeship with the Nobel-Prize winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Her poems appear in Collision I, II & III and More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets. She was one of the featured poets in Highway 99, A 

Literary Journey through California’s Great Central Valley and is the author of three chapbooks—Vision at Orestimba, Erratics, and handful of snow. 

Her popular monthly column in Stanislaus Connections, “Rivers of Birds, Forests of Tule: Central Valley Nature and Culture in Season,” was published in 2019  as a collection of the same name. Lillian is professor emeritus in English at MJC. 

Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is proud to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Rooja Mohassessy, author of When Your Sky Runs Into Mine, and Tamer Mostafa, author of Where Will I Find America? Hosted by Gillian Wegener. 

Date: Tuesday, June 11, 2024
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: The Artist Lab at Prospect Theater Project, 1214 K Street, Modesto CA 95354

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

ROOJA MOHASSESSY

Rooja Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet and educator. She is a MacDowell Fellow and an MFA graduate of Pacific University, Oregon. Her ekphrastic debut collection When Your Sky Runs Into Mine (Feb 2023) was the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Poetry Award. Rooja has been featured on NPR, The Hive Poetry Collective, and other poetry podcasts and radio stations. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poet Lore, RHINO Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, CALYX Journal, Ninth Letter, Cream City Review, The Adroit Journal, New Letters, The Rumpus, The Journal, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Her work is also anthologized in California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, and Colossus: Body, a compilation of writings by Californians writing on the themes of bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. Rooja is an editorial assistant at the journal Prairie Schooner.

About WHEN YOUR SKY RUNS INTO MINE

 “Rooja Mohassessy’s debut collection, WHEN YOUR SKY RUNS INTO MINE, 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. Ekphrasis is at the core of Mohassessy’s poetics, resplendent in her responses to works of visual art and in the richly textured images she creates with intricate diction and syntax.”

-Shara McCallum 

TAMER SAID MOSTAFA

Tamer Said Mostafa is an Arab-American, Muslim poet and storyteller from Stockton, California. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines such as Zone 3, Confrontation, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Freezeray among others. Tamer is a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, and a graduate of the creative writing program at University of California, Davis where he won the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Contest for Poetry. His debut, full length book of poetry, Where Will I Find America? was released in Summer 2021. Tamer lives life through spirituality, community work, and the music of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony.

About WHERE WILL I FIND AMERICA?

“In the debut collection Where Will I Find America?, Tamer Said Mostafa renders narratives of childhood to adulthood demanding an interrogation of what it means to be a person of other. From body image to intimacy, these poems beautifully weave inextricable culture and place. Islamic traditions provide the framework for extraordinary love of family as well as witnessing of self as each poem shelters the narrative bravely. We too want to see the past with eloquent bravery, knowing that its truth is not the same as what we imagine. This collection’s lyrical and visual evocations do no harm in the telling about the harmed. Empathy and love counter the brutality of social order and familial dislocation. As Mostafa brings mind and body into these compassionate poems, he reveals a hopeful awakening.”

-Rhony Bhopla