Hey, I just met you and this is crazy

but I took over hosting duties from the legendary Gillian Wegener for the Second Tuesday Poetry Series at the Barkin’ Dog Grill in Modesto.

This coming Tuesday, November 12, we feature a team of powerhouse poets from the Bay Area: Rosa Lane and Francesca Bell, both of whom come to Modesto trailing impressive ribbons of poetry success behind them.

Francesca Bell was born in Spokane, Washington, into a family with deep, hardscrabble roots in the Northwest. Her poems and translations appear in many magazines including ELLE, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, North American Review, and Prairie Schooner. She’s also appeared in many issues of Rattle, was the featured conversation in issue #56, and won the 2014 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor. She is the co-translator of Palestinian poet Shatha Abu Hnaish’s collection, A Love That Hovers Like a Bedeviling Mosquito (Dar Fadaat, 2017), and the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019). For more information, visit Francesca Bell Poet.

Rosa Lane is the author of three poetry collections: Chouteau's Chalk--winner of the 2017 Georgia Poetry Prize—which was published earlier this year by University of Georgia Press; Tiller North (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2016), winner of a 2017 National Indie Excellence Award and 2017 Maine Literary Award for Short Works, 5-poem excerpt; and a chapbook, Roots and Reckonings (Granite Press, East). Lane earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College where she studied with Jean Valentine, Jane Cooper, Grace Paley, and Tom Lux. Lane's work most recently won first place for the 2018 William Matthews Poetry Prize and was named finalist for the 2018 Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. Her recent poems are forthcoming or have appeared in the Asheville Poetry Review, Chattahoochee Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cutthroat, FOLIO, Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. For more information, please visit Rosa Lane.

The evening will be kicked off by singer/songwriter Eva Cluff, a senior at Pitman High who is very involved in the drama department there. She has loved musical theater all her life, and began puttering around with writing her own songs when she got her first ukulele in 8th grade.

Open mic following our featured readers. Come prepared to write your name on the famous clipboard.