"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!

May's featured poets are Raquel Gutiérrez and Sue Landers in celebration of their collections, Brown Neon: Essays and What to Carry into the Future.

Raquel Gutiérrez is a bilingual writer, poet, critic, performer, and the author of Brown Neon (Coffee House Press), a 2023 Recipient of The Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. Gutiérrez is a proud anchor baby born in Los Angeles to a mother from El Saucé, La Únion, El Salvador, and a father from Pachuca, Hidalgo, Mexico. Gutiérrez has been a part of several creative ecosystems and artistic communities for the last three decades and was recently named a 2025 recipient of the United States Artist fellowship as well as a 2025 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts fellowship. They completed a Fall 2024 Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, where they worked on their new poetry collection, "Southwest Reconstruction" (a triptych), which comes out late Fall 2025 on Noemi Press. Gutiérrez has lived on unceded lands of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui people since 2016. www.raquelgutierrez.net

Brown Neon is a meditation on southwestern terrains, intergenerational queer dynamics, and surveilled brown artists that crosses physical and conceptual borders. Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutiérrez's debut essay collection gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships. For Gutiérrez, terrain is essential to understanding that no story, no matter how personal, is separate from the space where it unfolds. Whether contemplating the value of adobe as both vernacular architecture and commodified art object, highlighting the feminist wounding and transphobic apparitions haunting the multigenerational lesbian social fabric, or recalling a failed romance, Gutiérrez traverses complex questions of gender, class, identity, and citizenship with curiosity and nuance.

Sue Landers is a poet and a pedestrian. Her latest book, What to Carry Into the Future, emerged from riding every New York City subway line from end to end. Sue is a former executive director of Lambda Literary, and she lives in Brooklyn. https://www.susanlanders.com/ 

What to Carry Into the Future uses transportation and location as a metaphor and a conduit to explore beleaguered social relationships and standards that are challenged by political and natural forces. When we look for a city’s infrastructure, where do we find it, what do we see, and what does it tell us about how we’re living? Landers’ book is a poetic exploration that cultivates an anarchic desire to ride the entire system, not to commute, or to travel directly from point A to point B, but to approach the subway map as an artist and a passenger. Landers’ MTA is much more than a dysfunctional, violent, and dirty hole in the ground. It is the arterial network we rely on to move. Set within New York City’s subways, streets, and waterways, What to Carry into the Future explores the importance of resilience as a bulwark against collapse.

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 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.

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. 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 Raquel Gutiérrez and Sue Landers