Stella Beratlis

Poet Laureate of Modesto
2016 – 2020

Reading Patterson Pass

Stella Beratlis’s second collection of poems, Dust Bowl Venus, was published in 2021 by Sixteen Rivers Press. She is the past poet laureate of the City of Modesto and a founding member of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center. Her work has been published in California Quarterly, In Posse Review, Penumbra, Quercus Review, Joaquin Magazine, and Harbor Review, among others, and in the anthology The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed. She is coeditor of the anthology More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets. She hosts a monthly poetry reading series, Second Tuesday Poetry. She lives in Modesto, where she works as a librarian.