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. Click here to register to attend virtually. 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!
January's featured poets are Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Brian Teare in celebration of their collections, The New Economy and Poem Bitten by a Man.
January's Meet Me There will be a potluck - join us for an evening full of poetry, conversation, food, and community. Masks are required for the reading & discussion portion of the evening. Following the reading, there will be an opportunity to get food and settle in for community & conversation. Attendees are encouraged to bring a dish to share! Some things to keep in mind regarding food:
- There is only a microwave for anything that needs to be reheated.
- Please refrain from bringing dishes with common allergies (shellfish, peanuts, etc).
- Please bring a serving spoon/utensil, if needed.
- Please include a label for your dish that includes main ingredients and an indication if it is vegan or vegetarian.
- Bringing a dish is not required to attend the program - come as you are!
Featured Poets
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer's Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi's poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and
journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn't K*ll Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi was the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022 - 2023. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice. Their new collection of poetry, The New Economy, is a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry.
A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books of poetry, including Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize. His most recent publications are a diptych of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven and Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the 2024 William Carlos Williams Award. A selected essays, Textual Preference, will be out from Nightboat Books in 2027. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, Brian is now a Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
Opening Poet
Maya Marshall is a poet, essayist, and editor. She is the author of All the Blood Involved in Love (2022) and the chapbook Secondhand (2016), and winner of the 2024 Holmes National Poetry Prize awarded by the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University. Marshall co-founded underbelly, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision, and serves as poetry director for Haymarket Books and as a program consultant for the Writing Freedom Fellowship. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, Cave Canem, Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and Emory University. Her poems and essays are published widely in various publications including Prose to the People (Penguin Random House, 2025), American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Boston Review, Poets.org, Split This Rock, and Best New Poets. She lives in Decatur, Georgia.
Host Poet
Samuel Ace is a trans & genderqueer poet whose most recent books include 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 and Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* Germinal Texts, 2019). He is also the author of several chapbooks. Ace is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, a multi-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and the National Poetry Series. His work has been widely published and recent work can be found in The Georgia Review, Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most (Copper Canyon), The Texas Review, Poetry, We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans 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 6:30 PM ET.
- This event will be live-streamed via Crowdcast. Click here to register to attend virtually.
- 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
aW5mbyB8IGNoYXJpc2Jvb2tzYW5kbW9yZSAhIGNvbQ== or call the store at 404-524-0304
Please contact us at
aW5mbyB8IGNoYXJpc2NpcmNsZSAhIG9yZw== 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 at
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/10538231?hl=en. 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
aW5mbyB8IGNoYXJpc2NpcmNsZSAhIG9yZw==.
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
aW5mbyB8IGNoYXJpc2NpcmNsZSAhIG9yZw== immediately.
You may also like the following events from Charis Books and More/Charis Circle:
- This Thursday, 11th December, 12:30 am, A Glossary of Snow by Feral Willcox: A Group Reading in Decatur, Georgia
- This Friday, 12th December, 07:30 pm, This Unruly Witness: June Jordan's Legacy -- Becky Thompson in Conversation with Maya Marshall in Decatur
- This Saturday, 13th December, 10:00 am, Holiday Party! in Decatur
Also check out other
Arts events in Decatur,
Literary Art events in Decatur,
Food & Drink events in Decatur.
