Modesto Poetry Festival with Danusha Laméris & Gary Thomas

Danusha Laméris will lead a workshop on Knowing and Not-Knowing: Navigating Certainty and Uncertainty Through Poetic Gesture in the morning. Following a brief break, Gary Thomas will lead an afternoon workshop.

Writing is a way of knowing. It asks us to examine memory, certainty, and the possibility of revelation. We will explore how we can use the pivots of gesture to complicate our work, layer certainty with uncertainty, knowing with not-knowing. Let’s learn how to engage ourselves, and our readers, by unraveling what we’ve just said. You’ll see how this brings work to life, and can lead us to our own epiphanies. While I will be sharing sample work from poems, this can be applied to poetry and prose.

Danusha Laméris is the author of The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), which was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her poems have been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The SUN Magazine, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and winner of a 2021 Northern California Book Award. The 2020 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, she teaches poetry independently, and is a Poet Laureate emeritus of Santa Cruz County, California. She is currently on the faculty of Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program.

About: Laméris is an American poet born to a Dutch father and a Caribbean mother from the island of Barbados. She was raised in the California Bay Area, spending her early years in Mill Valley, then moving to Berkeley, where she attended The College Preparatory School. Since graduating with a degree in Studio Art from The University of California at Santa Cruz, she has lived in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains.

Gary Thomas: Shoulds and Shelters: Carving Out Corners of Presence

Amid the duties we think we “should” be performing for the benefit or opinions of others, how—to paraphrase James Crews— do we give ourselves permission to do nothing and allow for the space from which a sudden gratefulness can naturally arise? How do we carve out a space and time—and shelter—to practice?

Prior to retirement, Gary Thomas taught eighth grade language arts for thirty-one years and junior college English for seven, sharing and discussing at least one poem every day with students. He has had poems published in In the Grove, Time of Singing, and The Comstock Review, among others, and in the anthologies More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets and three of the Collision series. He is currently vice president of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center. He has a forthcoming book published by Finishing Line Press titled All the Connecting Lights.

Tickets $15; RSVP on Eventbrite (https://2022festival.eventbrite.com) for Zoom link.