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.

"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 usually 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!

June's featured poets are Nicholas Goodly and Jericho Brown in celebration of their collections, Star Power and The Tradition.

Nicholas Goodly, PhD. is the author of Star Power (Scribner Press, 2026) and Black Swim (Copper Canyon, 2022). Nicholas is a team member of the performing arts platform Fly on a Wall and writing editor of WUSSY Magazine. Goodly is a finalist for the 2020 Jake Adam York Prize, the runner-up for the 2019 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and recipient of the 2017 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Goodly has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, Boston Review, BOMB, The Poetry Project, Lambda Literary, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere.

Jericho Brown is the author of three collections of poetry: The Tradition (2019), a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry;  The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets; and Please (New Issues, 2008), which won the 2009 American Book Award. He is also the editor of the anthology How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill (Amistad, 2023), and The Selected Shepherd (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), a new retrospective on the work of the important  Black, gay poet Reginald Shepherd.

Brown is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Award (2024), the Whiting Writers Award, and fellowships from the The Academy of American Poets, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland. He was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Hurston Wright Poetry Prize, and was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2024. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Best American Poetry.

Brown lives in Atlanta where he is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing and Interim Director of Creative Writing at Emory University.

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 or in person at the event.

In-person event guidelines:

- All attendees must wear a face mask.
- 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@charisbooksandmore.com 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 our event, whether in person or virtual, 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.

https://www.charisbooksandmore.com/book/9798989708406

https://charisbooksandmore.com/book/9781732131118

Meet Me There: Featuring Nicholas Goodly & Jericho Brown