This event takes place in person at Charis and on Crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance. Please read the in-person event guidelines at the bottom of this page to be sure you can participate in the event.

Charis welcomes Mykal Alder June and Dani Herd for Call Me By My Name: A Trans Name Change Panel and Live Lit Show.

In anticipation of Trans Day of Visibility, join us for a discussion and celebration of what our names mean to us. Write Club Atlanta co-producers and friends Mykal Alder June and Dani Herd will share their experience with the legal name change process in Georgia, and take questions from the audience. If you have your own documents that need to be notarized, please bring them! Dani is a notary public, and will be stamping for free.

Following the panel, we have a line-up of incredible trans writers who will be sharing work inspired by the prompt of “names.” Writers include:

Billie Sainwood is a poet, performer, and trans menace living in Atlanta. Her work has been featured in Had Magazine, the Passionfruit Review, and she was recently one of Bloodletter Magazine's 2025 Trans Voices in Horror. Her poetry collections, WHAT WAS EATEN WAS GIVEN and 36 VIEWS OF MY BREASTS, are available from Kith Books.

Dr. Kelsey L. Smoot (they/he/Kelz) is a Tin House Workshop alum, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Best of the Net nominee,  and a Best New Poets nominee. Proudly, he is also the author of two chapbooks: we was bois together with CLASH! (An Imprint of Mouthfeel Press) and Muse, with Another New Calligraphy. Thrillingly, Kelz’s debut full-length collection of poems, SOULMATE AS A VERB arrives in early 2026 with DOPAMINE/Semiotext(e).

Samuel Ace is a trans & genderqueer writer and the author, most recently, of I want to start by saying (Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2024), Portals, a collaboration with the late poet Maureen Seaton (Ravenna Press 2025), Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish 2019), and Meet Me There: Normal Sex and Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* Germinal Texts 2019). He is also the author of several chapbooks. Ace is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry. His work has been widely published and recent work can be found in The Georgia Review, Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most (Copper Canyon), The Texas Review, Poetry, We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He curates and hosts Meet Me There @ Charis, a monthly reading series that features trans and queer writers, at Charis Books in Decatur, GA.

Femmaeve MacQueen-Rose (she/they) is an Atlanta-based actress and writer dedicated to audacious trans-visibility on stage and screen. In a 2024 production of The Seagull directed by Vivian Bang at Pullman Yards, Femm was one of the first transwomen ever to portray the role of Irina Arkadina in the play's 120 year history. In 2025, Femm wrote and debuted a workshop of her 8,000 word performance poem, Still Life With Roses, at Windmill Arts as part of her fellowship at FADlab ATL. Most recently, her full-length play, Eyebright, was named a 2026 finalist in the Del Shores Foundation Writers Search. Other past work includes staged oral history projects, devised theater, an epic pageant for queer community, and explorations on interruptive theater. Femm holds advanced degrees in queer performance studies and American studies. To keep up with her work, you can follow her on Instagram @femmaeve.

Dani Herd (they/he) is an Atlanta-based writer and theatre artist. They co-produce the live lit show, Write Club Atlanta, and  teach a class about Writing for Performance through Dad’s Garage Theatre Company. His one-person show about being trans and loving Spider-Man (a story in three peters parker) won the Producers’ Choice Award at the 2022 Atlanta Fringe Festival and has since had performances at Out Front Theatre Company and Kennesaw State University. His full-length play Monster Girls at Sunshine Doughnuts was a 2020 recipient of the Ethel Woolson Lab through Atlanta’s Working Title Playwrights. They love powerlifting and iced coffee and their cat Clem, who is extremely orange and good.

Mykal Alder June is a writer, producer, and musician in Atlanta, Georgia. Most recently making podcasts for iHeartRadio, she spent over a decade in public radio at WABE, where her work earned awards from the Georgia Association of Broadcasters and the Associated Press. She is co-host of WRITE CLUB, a live literary series which kicks the ass of most any poetry reading you’d care to name. Her writing has appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Creative Loafing Atlanta, Aaron Mahnke’s 13 Days of Halloween podcast, and the anthologies Bare-Knuckled Lit and 12 Authors 12 Stories 2018. She records music as meaning of everything.

The event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Charis Circle's mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. Donate on Crowdcast or via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate.

All attendees must wear a face mask during the event.

We will begin seating people at 6:30PM EST.

This event will be live-streamed via Crowdcast. 

As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event.

Charis has both stairs and an elongated ramp at the entrance. Accessible parking is to the left of the building. Charis Books is a fully wheelchair accessible space with on site van accessible parking, two ramps, and additional overflow accessible parking nearby. Most of our shelves are on wheels and can be moved to provide additional access. The insides are all level and flat with ramps to access various areas of the space. Our bathrooms are wheelchair accessible and gender neutral with motion activated fixtures. Both bathrooms have wheelchair accessible baby changing tables. Our directional signs are written in braille. Please contact us at info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. Please contact us at info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible.

By attending this event, whether in person or virtually, you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Unsolicited sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to Charis staff immediately.