"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. 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!

February's featured poets are Rickey Laurentiis and Noa Micaela Fields in celebration of their collections, Death of the First Idea and E.

Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to be reacquainted with the light. Call her Key. Boy with Thorn, their debut book, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her other honors include fellowships from the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh as Inaugural Fellow. In 2022, Laurentiis was named a Living Legends Honoree by the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, an organization which celebrates black trans lives. Her second book, Death of the First Idea, published in 2025 from Knopf, was longlisted for the National Book Award.

Noa Micaela Fields is an echodeviant (trans poet with hearing aids) in search of the hypervivid in her one and only captionless life. Her debut poetry book E is now out from Nightboat Books. You can also find her words in Anomaly, Poem of the Day, Sixty Inches From Center, Tripwire, and Zoeglossia, among other places. She lives in Chicago, where she hosts poetry readings at the Poetry Foundation. www.doyounoapoet.com

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.

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 event, whether in person or virtually, 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 Charis staff immediately or email info@chariscircle.org.

Meet Me There: Featuring Rickey Laurentiis and Noa Micaela Fields