This event takes place in person at Charis and on Crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is requested. Register here to attend virtually. Click here to register to attend in-person. 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. 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 author is Charlie Jane Anders in celebration of Lessons in Magic and Disaster, a novel full of love, disaster, and magic.

Featured Author

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster, coming August 2025 from Tor Books. Her other novels include All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night and the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy. She's also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can't Survive, a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. She's won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Awards. She co-created Escapade, a transgender superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running New Mutants comic. And she's currently the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

Jess Lewis is a trans non-binary and pansexual writer, designer, and organizer who hails from the hollers of Western North Carolina. They currently live in the deep South, where they explore futures of liberation and how to get there. Their speculative fiction showcases character-based stories of trauma recovery in abstract, lyrical, and often fantastical stories. Recently they’ve focused on stories envisioning rural queer futures through ecofeminist science fiction.

They also work with marginalized communities, especially queer communities, through a variety of hands-on workshops that aim to process and envision futures. They’ve facilitated well over two hundred workshops, ranging from subversive cross-stitch to creating visions of personal utopias. Hundreds of participants have shared space, conversation, and creativity. When they’re not imagining queer utopias, designing future tech, or facilitating capacity-building workshops, they’re organizing programming for The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird.

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:

We will begin seating people at 7:00 PM ET.

Please note, seating is first come, first served, unless you reach out to info@chariscircle.org with an accessible seating request.

This event will be live-streamed via Crowdcast. Register here. 

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 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 Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders