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.

In honor of National Poetry Month, Charis presents an exciting showcase of poets! Adedayo Agarau (The Years of Blood), Kameryn Alexa Carter (Antediluvian), nawa angel a.h. (Waling waling palpitations), and Maura Modeya  (SAPPHO TERROR) represent a range of voices and styles in contemporary poetics. Join us virtually or in-person to explore these "small bites" of each poet's larger works, which are sure to leave you hungry for more!

Adedayo Agarau is the author of The Years of Blood, winner of the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers (Fordham University Press, Fall 2025). He is a Wallace Stegner Fellow ‘25, a Cave Canem Fellow and a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship finalist. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine: A Journal of African Literature and Art and a Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. He is the author of the chapbooks Origin of Name (African Poetry Book Fund, 2020) and The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020).

Kameryn Alexa Carter is a black poet. She is founding co-editor of Emergent Literary, an online journal for the work of black and brown artists. Her work has appeared in Bennington Review, Phoebe Journal, Torch Literary Arts, The Best American Poetry, Portable Gray, and elsewhere. She was a Pushcart Prize winner, and is the author of Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) and Antediluvian (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026). She can be found dictating lines to her phone while speeding down the freeway, interrupting the meditative act of putting ground coffee in the stovetop coffee pot to jot down a word or phrase, or writing in 6/4 time, trying to keep up with the Mingus record spinning on the player across the room.

nawa angel a.h., widely known as Moonyeka, is a chimeric creator with a multi-embodied presence in performance, qt nightlife, writing, experimental media, teaching artistry and divination praxis. They center kilig as a compass to conjure erotically charged revolutions with animistic unapology, risque', and Ilocano imagination.

nawa's past publications can be found in smoke and mold; Khôra; The Holy Hour anthology by Working Girls Press; Seventh Wave's On Queer Family Anthology; Instruction Manual for a New Era with

PNW Conceptual Art Center; and Lilac Peril. They have been the recipient of residencies, awards and fellowships including Tin House, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art CXL, In Surreal Life, George Newsome Humanitarian Award, Mary Gates Research Award, Arc Fellowship,  and Andy Warhol Foundation's Precipice Fund Award.

nawa exists in the in-between, frequently emerging on Tongva, Chumash, Chinook, Puyallup, Duwamish lands; the Coast Salish sea. Waling waling palpitations is their first book.

Maura Modeya is a poet from northern Minnesota. Their work attends to the lived-in world and what haunts it, focusing on insomnia, the ghost of Sappho, U.S. empire violence, queer ecologies, and the reclamation of public space through wheatpasting. She holds an MFA from Naropa University and currently lives in Atlanta. Maura’s debut poetry collection SAPPHO TERROR is forthcoming from Prroblem Press April 2026.

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:

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@chariscircle.org 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 this 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.

Poetry Showcase