Second Tuesday @ Barkin’ Dog

Join us for the Second Tuesday Barkin’ Dog reading on June 11th at 6:00 at the Barkin’ Dog Grill in downtown Modesto. Our featured poets will be Stella Beratlis and Gillian Wegener. Wegener has been running the Barkin’ Dog series for the past 10 years and is now handing the reins over to Beratlis, who will carry on with new energy and all her grace and verve and humor. And there will be cake!

An open mic will follow the featured reading, so bring a poem or two to share.

Stella Beratlis is the author of Alkali Sink and the poet laureate of Modesto. Her work has been published in California Quarterly, In Posse Review, hardpan, Song of the San Joaquin, Penumbra, and Quercus Review as well as the anthology The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed. She is a librarian at Modesto Junior College.

Gillian Wegener is the author of two collections of poetry, both from Sixteen Rivers Press, The Opposite of Clairvoyance (2008) and This Sweet Haphazard (2017). Her work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and is forthcoming from MockingHeart Review. Wegener is a co-founder of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center, has served as poet laureate for the City of Modesto, and started this reading series in June of 2009.

Poetry Book Club

MoSt is pleased to announce another installment of our Poetry Book Club! Join us for a conversation about Theodore Roethke’s final collection The Far Field. Four copies of The Far Field are available at the downtown Modesto library to check out, but if you have Roethke’s Collected Poems, almost the entire collection is included there as well.

The book club will be held Wednesday, July 24 at 6:30 in the conference room at the downtown library and will be facilitated by Salvatore Salerno.  See you there!

Summer Poetry Workshops 2019

Join us at the Downtown Modesto Library for our FINAL Summer Poetry Workshop of 2019. Tom Portwood will lead a workshop on Writing Poems of Social Justice — the Art of Empathy.

All experience levels are welcome. This event is part of the MoSt Summer Poetry Workshop series.

All workshops are FREE TO THE PUBLIC with materials and inspiration provided. Sponsored by Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and the Friends of the Modesto Library.

Summer Poetry Workshops 2019

Join us at the Downtown Modesto Library for our third Summer Poetry Workshop of 2019. Gillian Wegener will lead a workshop on Poetry of Place. Write new poems inspired by other poems of place and some questions that will help you dig deep and find new creativity in writing about places that are important to us.

All experience levels are welcome. This event is part of the MoSt Summer Poetry Workshop series.

All workshops are FREE TO THE PUBLIC with materials and inspiration provided. Sponsored by Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and the Friends of the Modesto Library.

Summer Poetry Workshops 2019

Join us at the Downtown Modesto Library for our second Summer Poetry Workshop of 2019. Stella Beratlis and Nancy Lewis will lead a workshop on Erasure/Blackout poetry. Participants will create their own new poems based on prompts and examples. See http://newspaperblackout.com/ or http://erasures.wavepoetry.com/ for examples.

All experience levels are welcome. This event is part of the MoSt Summer Poetry Workshop series.

All workshops are FREE TO THE PUBLIC with materials and inspiration provided. Sponsored by Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and the Friends of the Modesto Library.