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.

"Meet Me There" is a monthly intergenerational poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction experience curated by trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist Samuel Ace. Writers exploring genre and gender boundaries will be a special focus of this series. This event usually takes place on the second Thursday of each month at 7:30pm ET. Some months our readings will take place at Charis Books with an option to watch virtually, and some months the event will be fully virtual, so be sure to check the listing!

Our poets for June are Danez Smith and Tameka Cage Conley.

Danez Smith is the author of four collections including Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and most recently Bluff, a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.  They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez was won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, as well as an array of grants, fellowships, and residencies including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Princeton Arts Fellowship. Danez lives in the Twin Cities with their people and teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, MN.

Tameka Cage Conley is a literary artist and creative intellectual who writes fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and librettos. She was born in post-Jim Crow Shreveport, Louisiana and reared by a tightly knit matriarchal family led by her great- grandmother who told stories about injustice and resistance – these stories inform the commitment to social justice in her literary craft.

Tameka has lived all over Louisiana as well as in Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Georgia, where she now resides. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she was awarded the Truman Capote Fellowship and the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship in Fiction. She has received writing fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, the Vermont Studio Center, and in 2013, The Pittsburgh Foundation awarded her its annual Eben Demarest grant award, previously awarded to Jackson Pollock and Kyle Abraham.

In 2019, the opera for which Tameka wrote the libretto, A Gathering of Sons, was awarded the Bronze Medal in the Society and Social Issues category of the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards. She has been commissioned twice by the Stanley Museum of Art for work in response to renowned African American sculptor and graphic artist, Elizabeth Catlett, and she was also commissioned by the Avisca Fine Art Gallery to write an essay exploring selective paintings by Ann Tanksley as inspired by the work of Zora Neale Hurston. Tameka is a two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize in poetry and fiction, and her poem dedicated to Prince Rogers Nelson, "Because They Was Purple" was nominated for the Best of the Net Prize.

Tameka received her PhD from Louisiana State University, where she was a recipient of the Huel Perkins Doctoral Fellowship and recipient of the Lewis Simpson Distinguished Dissertation Award for her dissertation, “Painful Discourses: Borders, Regions, and Representations of Female Circumcision from Africa to America.” An Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oxford College of Emory University, Tameka produces a distinguished conversation series. She is at work on her first novel, You, Your Father – an epic family saga that considers the untimely deaths of African American men over six decades, beginning in the early 1940s in Shreveport.


Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer writer and sound artist. His latest books are I want to start by saying (Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2024), Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish 2019), and Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* 2019). Ace is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a repeat finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. Recent work can be found in Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most, Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, Fence, BathHouse, The Texas Review, Poetry, We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetry, Best American Experimental Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies.

The event is free and open to all people, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Donate on crowdcast or via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate or in person at the event.

In-person event guidelines:

- All attendees must wear a face mask.
- We will begin seating people at 7:00 PM ET.
- This event will be live-streamed via Crowdcast. 
- As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request specific accessibility accommodations, please contact info@charisbooksandmore.com or call the store at 404-524-0304


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. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org. 



By attending our virtual event 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 info@chariscircle.org immediately.

Meet Me There: Danez Smith and Tameka Cage Conley