"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 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!

May's featured poets are Christopher Nelson (editor), Jos Charles, Rajiv Mohabir, and Magdalena Zurawski from the anthology, Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry.

Christopher Nelson is the author of Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and four chapbooks, including Blue House, winner of a Poetry Society of America Fellowship. The recipient of the 2023–24 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, he is the founding editor of Under a Warm Green Linden and Green Linden Press, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to poetic excellence and reforestation. His anthology Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora received a Midwest Book Award and was named one of the best poetry books of the year by Entropy Magazine.

Jos Charles is author of the poetry collections a Year & other poems (Milkweed Editions, 2022), feeld, a Pulitzer-finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series selected by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions, 2018), and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press, 2016). She teaches as a part of Randolph College's low-residency MFA program and resides in Long Beach, CA.

Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of four books of poetry including Whale Aria (Four Way Books 2023), Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction have been finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. He is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Magdalena Zurawski's novel The Bruise was published in 2008 by FC2/University of Alabama Press. It received both a 2008 Lambda Award and the 2007 Ronald Sukenick- American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. Litmus Press published her poetry collection Companion Animal in 2015, which won the Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her most recent collection, The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom, came out from Wave Books in the spring of 2019. The Operating System released Zurawski’s poem/essay Don’t Be Scared as a chapbook in Summer 2019 and her essay Being Human is an Occult Practice was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Fall 2020.

Zurawski was a 2022-23 Fulbright Scholar in Poland, where she traced family war histories for her current book project and began translating poet Miron Bialoszewski's prose work, Heart Attack.

Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist. His most recent books are Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish), Meet MeThere: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* Germinal Texts), and the chapbook What started / this mess (above/ground press). 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 ex-Puritan, POETRY, We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetry, PEN America, Best American Experimental Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. A book-length poetic essay, I Want to Start by Saying, is forthcoming from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center (2024).

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 the night of the event.

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. We are actively learning the best practices for this technology and we welcome your feedback as we begin this new way of connecting across distances.

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. 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.

Please enter an amount between 0 and $500 to reserve your virtual seat.

Meet Me There: Featuring Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry