Meet Me There: Featuring The Valleys Are So Lush And Steep By Trace Peterson

From the venue:

Meet Me There: Featuring The Valleys Are So Lush And Steep by Trace Peterson

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! March's featured poet is Trace Peterson in celebration of The Valleys Are So Lush And Steep, a collection of poetry that speaks to universal issues of how self, imagination, language, and the environment are intertwined. 
Featured Poet
Trace Peterson is a trans woman poet, editor, and literary scholar. Her poetry books are The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep (2025 Saturnalia Books Alma Award winner), Since I Moved In (Chax Press, Gil Ott Award 2007/2019), and several chapbooks. She co-edited the first-ever published anthology of trans poets Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013) which is currently in its fourth printing, and Arrive On Wave: Collected Poems of Gil Ott (Chax, 2016). She also edits the small press EOAGH which has won a National Book Award and two Lambda Literary Awards including the first ever given in the category of Transgender Poetry. Her work has recently appeared in Super Gay Poems (Harvard UP), Boundary 2, The Weird Sister Collection (The Feminist Press), Interim: Poetry and Poetics, and Trans Space is Expanding zine. She currently teaches in the WGSS Program at UConn. She was recently the N.E.H. Post-Doctoral Fellow in Poetics at Emory University's Fox Center and it feels good to be coming back to visit. 
Opening Poets
Maura Modeya is a poet from northern Minnesota. Their work attends to the lived-in world and what haunts it, focusing on insomnia, the ghost of Sappho, U.S. empire violence, queer ecologies, and the reclamation of public space through wheatpasting. She holds an MFA from Naropa University and currently lives in Atlanta. Maura’s debut poetry collection SAPPHO TERROR is forthcoming from Prroblem Press April 2026. 
Isadoro Saturno (Barquisimeto, 1987) is a poet, translator, editor, and author of children’s books based in Atlanta. He is the author of Conejo y Conejo (Ekaré, 2018), dear parent or guardian / estimado representante (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023), and Shigeru Ban Builds a Better World (Tra Publishing, 2023). In 2024, he translated Mariposa (Ekaré), which received the XV Premi Llibreter. His forthcoming poetry collection, Self-made American Man, will be published by Arraigo (Madrid), and his work has appeared widely in collections, literary magazines, digital platforms, zines, and anthologies.
Host Poet
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. 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 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.

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