"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 7:30 pm 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!

October's featured poet is extra special! We are celebrating "Meet Me There" host Samuel Ace and his newest collection, I want to start by saying. Samuel Ace’s I want to start by saying is a constellation of memory, personal and place-based histories, dailiness, repetition, art-making, and desire.

Ace’s insistent titular phrase acts as drone and anchor—invocation and prayer—propelling the peripatetic narrator from Cleveland to New York to Tucson, western Massachusetts to Atlanta and back again, line by line. Part essay, part memoir, and part collage, Ace explores the difficulties of romance, childhood, betrayal, and writing, establishing each sentence as a location to begin anew; to utter, accrete, and break again.

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.

Andrea Abi-Karam is a trans, SWANA, punk poet-performer cyborg. They are the author of EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), Villainy (Nightboat Books, Sept 2021), and with Kay Gabriel, they co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020). They are currently writing a poet's novel about crushes.

Maura M.M. is a dyke ritual poet and performer from the headwaters of the Mississippi in Bemidji, MN. Their poetry interrogates the pressures between sleep obsession and dyke desire within the context of US gun violence and arms of colonialism. Wheatpasting informs her practice by bringing guerrilla poetry to public space as acts of queer reclamation and visual disruption. They curate the B HOT READ A POEM reading series to uplift local queer poets. Her work appears in Terse Journal, The Texas Review, and South Broadway Press, aside from her chapbook Only Interested in Everything by Meekling Press. Maura holds an MFA in writing and poetics from Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where they taught research-based writing until recently relocating to Atlanta.

Saretta Morgan was born in Appalachia and raised on military installations. Her work considers the ecologies and intimacies that materialize in the shadows of U.S. militarization. From 2018-2023 she lived between the Sonoran and Mohave Deserts where she organized with the grassroots humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths, as well as several community-based initiatives that centered wellness for BIPOC and immigrant communities. Her first full-length book of poems, Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), emerged from those experiences. She is also the author of the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (2018) and room for a counter interior (2017). More at sarettamorgan.com.

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.

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

If you would like to watch the virtual event with computer-generated captions, please watch in Google Chrome and enable captions. 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 continue to connect across distances.

By attending our 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 I want to start by saying by Samuel Ace