Meet Me There: CRUEL/CRUEL by Dior J. Stephens

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. Each month Samuel pairs an established or mid-career artist with an up and coming writer for a reading by each artist and a discussion of the resonances between their works. Writers exploring genre and gender boundaries will be a special focus of this series. This event 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!

Featured Poet

September's featured poet is Dior J. Stephens in celebration of CRUEL/CRUEL, a response to the unimaginable cruelties that became our new quotidian in 2020, that moves musically and discursively through innovative permutations of lyric form. CRUEL/CRUEL is the manifestation of a Black, queer voice grappling with the intricacies of (un)belonging and identity. These poems use genres of queerness and race to reckon with the pervasive power of oppressive institutions, shaped by art and a soundtrack of Black musical traditions of resistance: from jazz to soul to experimental to hip hop. A hybrid visual and literary object, CRUEL/CRUEL feels relentlessly present, and yet emphasizes the archival and documentary as intrinsic to our personal and collective survivals.

Dior J. Stephens is a proud pisces hailing from Midwestern waters. He is the author of the chapbooks SCREAMS & lavender, 001, and CANNON!. Their debut full-length collection, CRUEL/CRUEL is out now with Nightboat Books. You can find their work in Somesuch Stories, fourteen poems, Peach Mag, and more. They happily serve as the Managing Poetry Editor of Foglifter Journal and Press. 

Opening Poet

W.J. Lofton is a Black Queer Southern poet and multimodal artist. He is the author of A Garden for Black Boys Between the Stages of Soil and Stardust. His work has appeared widely, including TIME, wildness, Scalawag Magazine, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and No Justice, No Peace: From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter. His  memoir, Sue City, is forthcoming from Beacon Press. He holds writing and art fellowships from Cave Canem and Emory University. Lofton’s constant concern is freedom and the ways in which we access it, particularly through pain, love, grief, and pleasure. Atlanta, GA is his home, where he prioritizes community building, frolicking, and joy.

Host Poet

Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist. His most recent books are Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish), Meet MeThere: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* Germinal Texts), and the chapbook What started / this mess (above/ground press). 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 ex-Puritan, POETRY, We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetry, PEN America, Best American Experimental Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. A book-length poetic essay, I Want to Start by Saying, is forthcoming from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center (2024).