Poetry on Sunday Series

Come join us at the Carnegie Arts Center in Turlock for our quarterly reading series! Download the PDF flyer at right, and read more about our featured poets below:

Linda Marie Prather has five published chapbooks, the latest being Painting Your Absence (Dry Creek Press.) Unforced Rhythms (Finishing Line Press) won 3^rd Place award in the NLAPW 2014 Letters Competition. Her full-length book, Summer Song, was published in 2016. She edits for Song of The San Joaquin, is a member of National League of American Pen Women, in Arts and Letters. Her poetry appears in More Than Soil, More Than Sky/ The Modesto Poets. Linda is published widely and has received prizes from Penumbra, Poets’ Dinner Contest, Ina Coolbrith Circle, the Golden Pegasus Award, and has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

I was born into the name of Janette Jameson in Santa Cruz, California. At seven, my family moved to Torreon, Mexico, where my father became a principal of an American School. As a second grader, I was thrust into a new language and culture. I received a bilingual education, learning my times tables in Spanish and my addition in English. I experienced the constant back-and-forth between two worlds, and as a result was outsider to both.

I have always loved words—their use and their layered meanings. They feel almost tangible—to be worked with and at times played with. I have also always read, since picking up my first Nancy Drew mystery and spending most of the day on the couch until the end of the book. In being bilingual, I am very aware of the nuances in words and how much can be lost in translation. Bridges are important metaphors as well as a space where no language exists. The challenge in poetry is bringing words to places that already stand alone. I try to capture brief moments of observed life which become a springboard for a later poem.

I’m a retired social worker, married with two young adult daughters. I’ve lived in Modesto for the past twenty-six years, still looking for home perhaps by an oak tree.

Dana Koster is the author of Binary Stars (Carolina Wren Press 2017). She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her poems have appeared in EPOCH, Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Cincinnati Review, MUZZLE, Thrush Poetry Journal, Radar Poetry, and many others. She lives in Modesto, California with her husband and two sons, where she works as a wedding photographer.

Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa is a writer, editor, and the author of Rummage, which won the 2015 Little A Poetry Contest and is a 2018 Lambda Literary Award finalist. She is a Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Lambda Literary fellow. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Some Call it Ballin, Gabby, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is a native of Fresno, CA.