Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center is pleased to present Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Gary Thomas & Soul Vang 

Date: Tuesday, April 8, 2025
Time: 7:00 pm PST
Where: Bookish Modesto, 811 W. Orangeburg Ave, in the Roseburg Square shopping center

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

SOUL VANG

Soul Vang is the author of three collections of poetry:  Of Tigers and Wars  (Sahtu Press, 2024); Song of the Cluster Bomblet (HER Publisher, 2024); and To Live Here (Imaginary Friend Press, 2014).

Poet, educator, and U.S. Army veteran, Vang received his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from California State University, Fresno, and is an editorial member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle (HAWC).

Vang’s writing has appeared in Academy of American Poets (poets.org), Water~Stone Review, Abernathy Magazine, Asian American Literary Review, Fiction Attic Press, In the Grove, The Packinghouse Review, Southeast Asia Globe, and The New York Times, among others.

His awards and honors include the 2014 Imaginary Friend Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Horizon Artist Award from the Fresno Arts Council.

About TO LIVE HERE

To Live Here is a triumph: a pure and graceful portrait of the poet from Sky Mountain and the Dragon River, as a young man in the United States Army, and as a parent and poet in Fresno. Part emotional cartography and pure mastery of the craft, this vital glimpse into the Hmong American experience is a heart, a history, and a gift of hard-earned wisdom.  Each poem is an artifact, a piece of art, and an important addition to American literature. This is poetry built to last.  You will not forget it. –Lee Herrick, Fresno Poet Laureate

GARY THOMAS

Gary Thomas grew up on a peach farm outside Empire, California.  Prior to retirement, he taught eighth grade language arts for thirty-one years and junior college English for seven.  His poems have been published in The Comstock Review, MockingHeart Review, Atticus Review, River Heron Review, Barzakh, Blue Heron Review, Split Rock Review, Book of Matches, and Hole in the Head Review, among others, in the anthology More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets, and in Tule Review 2024.  He is a founding member of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center (MoSt) and of the Stanislaus County writing group known as The Licensed Fools.  A full-length collection, All the Connecting Lights, was released in August 2022 from Finishing Line Press.  His latest poetry collection, O Yes We Breathe, was published in November 2024 by Manzanita Writers Press.

ABOUT O YES WE BREATHE: 

In his new collection, O Yes We Breathe, Gary Thomas seamlessly weaves days-gone-by boyhood pastoral with the post-pandemic political and spiritual present. Moving between poems, I was transfixed by the gentle music within these pages. “I am beholden to beauty that breathes any way it can-” As inhale, Thomas’ keen eye for detail sharpens the blade of these poems on the sandstone grit of his father’s lessons on life. As exhale, Thomas delivers poignant and tender incantations summoning the deeper, higher self. “If all we ever have is what we trade invisibly in our hulls of flesh and fluidity, we can learn to care for what we have. We can partake our full portion as family. We can breathe easy.” Each poem is a circle within itself “still working with some astonishment,” rippling outward, a whole world. This collection: “Let it light the corners.”

-Kai Coggin, Poet Laureate of Hot Springs, Arkansas, author of Mother of Other Kingdoms and Mining for Stardust