"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!

September's featured poets are Joy Ladin and Oliver Baez Bendorf in celebration of their books, Family: Poems, Once Out of Nature: Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender, and Consider the Rooster.

Joy Ladin is the author of eleven poetry collections, including the brand-new Family from Persea; Shekhinah Speaks; National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna, and Lambda Literary Award finalists Impersonation (revised and reissued by Double Back) and Transmigration. Persea is simultaneously publishing her third book of creative non-fiction, Once Out of Nature: Selected Essays About the Transformation of Gender,  which follows her memoir of gender transition, Through the Door of Life, and groundbreaking work of trans theology, The Soul of the Stranger. Her work has been recognized with a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship, among other honors. Her work is available at www.joyladin.com.

Joy Ladin's most autobiographical and socially engaged collection to date, Family is an intimate exploration of private and public loss, resilience and love.

This compassionate, constructive volume, Once Out of Nature: Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender, by renowned author Joy Ladin collects eleven essays written between 2008, on the cusp of what Time called America's “transgender tipping point,” and 2021, as anti-trans laws began metastasizing around America.

Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Consider the Rooster, forthcoming October 1, 2024, and two previous collections of poems: Advantages of Being Evergreen and The Spectral Wilderness. His chapbook, The Gospel According to X, was selected for the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series. His poems have circulated in publications like American Poetry Review, BOMB, The Nation, and Yale Review, and anthologies including Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics and Latino Poetry: A New Anthology. His work has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Publishing Triangle Award. Born and raised in Iowa and now living along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, he is a CantoMundo fellow and teaches in the MFA program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Consider the Rooster serves as an ode to a rooster's crow, a catalyst for awakening, both literally and figuratively.


Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic, the aftermath of George Floyd's murder by police, and the resulting upsurge in reactionary right-wing militia violence, a neighbor in Kalamazoo, Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author's pet rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary transformation. An ecological consciousness embedded in these verses invites readers to acknowledge their place in a web of relations. Oliver Baez Bendorf's voice resounds through liminal spaces, at dusk and dawn, across personal meditations and wider cultural awakenings to form a collection overflowing with freedom, rebellion, mischief, and song.

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 Joy Ladin and Oliver Baez Bendorf