City of Modesto Poets’ Corner Contest

The City of Modesto’s Poets’ Corner Contest is accepting submissions until this Friday, March 9, so get your poems in today! Winning entries will be published in a chapbook and poets invited to a public reading on May 6, 2018.

Please use official Poets’ Corner guidelines and entry form (PDF) to submit your work.

Summer Poetry Workshops 2018: Write a Poem; Read a Poem

Join us at the Downtown Modesto Library for our fourth and final Summer Poetry Workshop of 2018: Write a Poem; Read a Poem with Gary Thomas and Gillian Wegener.

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

Summer Poetry Workshops 2018: Children’s Poetry Workshop

Join us at the Downtown Modesto Library for our third Summer Poetry Workshop of 2018: a poetry workshop just for kids, with Linda Scheller and friends.

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

Summer Poetry Workshops 2018: Teen Poetry Workshop

Join us at the Downtown Modesto Library for our second Summer Poetry Workshop of 2018: a Teen Poetry Workshop with Gillian Wegener.

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

Summer Poetry Workshops 2018: Crowd-Sourced Poetry

Join us at the Downtown Modesto Library for our first Summer Poetry Workshop of 2018. All workshops are FREE TO THE PUBLIC with materials and inspiration provided. Sponsored by Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center and the Stanislaus County Library.

Crowd-Sourced Poetry, also known as Exquisite Corpse, is a collaborative poetry game that has roots in the Surrealist movement. In this workshop, you’ll have fun and experience surprise by being part of a team effort where all of us contribute parts to each others’ work. You can use the result as a springboard to a different poem, revise your collaborative poem, or have fun with the poem as-is.

Rules: each participant is generally unaware of what the others have written, which often produces a “surprising—sometimes absurd—yet often beautiful” work (poets.org). Crowd-Sourced Poetry workshop is a fun way to collaborate with other poets and to write in a way which frees you from your usual writing habits.

This will be SO MUCH FUN! And there are other workshops to come.