Charis Books and More/Charis Circle

Check out this week’s picks from our staff round-up!
Abeo’s pick ():
· Don't Let It Kill You: Poems by Theo LeGro ()

Kira’s pick ():
· Puck: A Novel by Samantha Allen ()

Yarrow’s pick ():
· Homosexual Intifada: A Q***r Palestinian Anthology edited by George Abraham () & Hannah Moushabeck ()

Saisha’s pick ():
· Songs of No Provenance: A Novel by Lydi Conklin () – now in paperback! Event replay available on Youtube.

E.R.’s picks ():
· Mad Eden: A Novel by Morgan Thomas
· When Technology Fails, Revised and Expanded: The Definitive Manual for Preparedness in an Uncertain World () by Matthew Stein

Angela’s picks ():
· Girls Girls Girls by Shoshana von Blanckensee () – now in paperback!
· Palm Meridian: A Novel by Grace Flahive () – now in paperback!

Olivia’s picks:
· The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without S*x by Melissa Febos () – now in paperback! Event replay available on Youtube.
· The Double Dutch Fuss: A Memoir by Phill Branch ()

Other store picks and upcoming event books:
· Star Power: Poems by Nicholas Goodly – event on 6/10!
· The D**e and the Dybbuk (Sapphic Classic) by Ellen Galford – check out the event with Ellen Galford tonight (6/2) on Zoom!
· Better Pets by Leigh Bardugo (), Liz Climo () – signed copies available!
· Breakout by Dhonielle Clayton (), Tiffany D. Jackson (), Nic Stone (), Angie Thomas (), Ashley Woodfolk (), Nicola Yoon ()

Happy Pride Month!! We’re q***r all year but especially excited for our gay agenda (aka our June events calendar) this year. Join us for author events, a new q***r film series, regular programming, and more!

· Trans & Friends--Youth Group
Mon, 6/1/2026 | 7:00pm - 8:00pm | Virtual
· Charis After Dark: An After-Hours Experience
Fri, 6/5/2026 | 7:00pm - 10:00pm | In-person at Charis
· Trans & Friends--Adult Group
Mon, 6/1/2026 | 8:00pm - 9:00pm | Virtual
· Gender-Creative Parenting Collective
Wed, 6/3/2026 | 7:00pm - 8:00pm | Virtual
· Support Charis Circle on Give Out Day!
Thu, 6/4/2026 | All Day | Virtual
· Q***r Ecologies Book Club Reads: Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiq***r Speculative Fiction
Thu, 6/4/2026 | 7:00pm - 8:30pm | In-person at Charis
· Black Feminist Book Club Reads: The Cancer Journals
Sun, 6/7/2026 | 3:00pm - 4:30pm | In-person at Charis
· Lean Cat, Savage Cat: Lauren J. Joseph in conversation with E.R. Anderson
Sun, 6/7/2026 | 5:00pm - 6:00pm | Virtual
· Q/T YOUTH BOARD GAMES @ CHARIS BOOKS AND MORE
Mon, 6/8/2026 | 4:30pm - 6:30pm | In-person
· Say Nephew: On Boyhood, Unclehood, and Q***r Mentorship -- Steven Pfau in Conversation with Charles Stephens
Mon, 6/8/2026 | 7:30pm - 8:30pm | Hybrid
· Save the date: Raquel Willis in conversation with Alicia Garza in celebration of the paperback release of The Risk It Takes to Bloom!
Tue, 6/9/2026 | Details TBA!
· Q***r Romance Book Club Reads: Moonlighters: A Novella Collection
Tue, 6/9/2026 | 7:00pm - 8:30pm | Virtual
· Meet Me There: Featuring Nicholas Goodly & Jericho Brown
Wed, 6/10/2026 | 7:30pm - 8:30pm | Hybrid
· Trans Geographies of Joy: Building Community in Atlanta -- Elias Capello in conversation with SJ Dillon
Thu, 6/11/2026 | 7:30pm - 8:30pm | Hybrid
· Q***r Archival Film Night: Screening of Outlaw (1994)
Sat, 6/13/2026 | 7:00pm - 8:30pm | In-person
· Community Art Making: Cyanotype Printing with Cait!
Sun, 6/14/2026 | 2:00pm - 4:00pm | In-person
· Trans & Friends--Youth Group
Mon, 6/15/2026 | 7:00pm - 8:00pm | In-person
· Trans & Friends--Adult Group
Mon, 6/15/2026 | 8:00pm - 9:00pm | In-person
· Monthly Sapphic Writing Group
Tue, 6/16/2026 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm | In-person
· Earthly Playing Field: Radhika Singh in Conversation with Holiday Simmons
Wed, 6/17/2026 | 7:30pm - 8:30pm | Hybrid
· Cliterati Open Mic Featuring: Stevie Edwards in celebration of The Weather Inside
Thu, 6/18/2026 | 7:30pm - 8:30pm
· Monthly Meet & Mingle for LGBTQ+ Folks 50+
Sat, 6/20/2026 | 3:00pm - 4:30pm | In-person
· Conversion Therapy Dropout: A Q***r Story of Faith and Belonging -- Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez in conversation with Garrard Conley
Sat, 6/20/2026 | 7:00pm - 8:00pm | In-person at Neighborhood Church
· Q/T YOUTH BOARD GAMES @ CHARIS BOOKS AND MORE
Mon, 6/22/2026 | 4:30pm - 6:30pm | In-person
· Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl: Essays-- Amena Brown in conversation with Tayari Jones
Mon, 6/22/2026 | 6:30pm - 7:30pm | In-person at AARL
· Kidliterate Book Club Reads: A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking
Tue, 6/23/2026 | 7:00pm - 8:30pm | Virtual
· Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene -- Lorraine Boissoneault in conversation with Micaela Blei
Wed, 6/24/2026 | 7:30pm - 8:30pm | Virtual
· Southerners Against Surveillance Systems & Infrastructure Teach-in on Data centers, surveillance, and policing in DeKalb
Thurs, 6/25/2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm | In-person at Charis
· LGBTQ+ Book Club Reads: Be Gay, Do Crime: Sixteen Stories of Q***r Chaos
Sat, 6/27/2026 | 10:00am - 11:30am | Virtual
· SFQP 2026 Festival Artist Market
Sat, 6/27/2026 | 12:00pm - 6:00pm | In-person

We’re taking it easy this week to prepare for Charis After Dark on Friday, but we’ve still got our regular programming to look forward to AND a virtual event with Lauren J. Joseph for Lean Cat, Savage Cat!!

More info: https://charisbooksandmore.com/events/calendar

· Trans & Friends--Youth Group
Mon, 6/1/2026 | 7:00pm - 8:00pm | Virtual
· Trans & Friends--Adult Group
Mon, 6/1/2026 | 8:00pm - 9:00pm | Virtual
· Gender-Creative Parenting Collective
Wed, 6/3/2026 | 7:00pm - 8:00pm | Virtual
· Support Charis Circle on Give Out Day!
Thu, 6/4/2026 | All Day | Virtual
· Q***r Ecologies Book Club Reads: Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiq***r Speculative Fiction
Thu, 6/4/2026 | 7:00pm - 8:30pm | In-person at Charis
· Charis After Dark: An After-Hours Experience
Fri, 6/5/2026 | 7:00pm - 10:00pm | In-person at Charis
· Black Feminist Book Club Reads: The Cancer Journals
Sun, 6/7/2026 | 3:00pm - 4:30pm | In-person at Charis
· Lean Cat, Savage Cat: Lauren J. Joseph () in conversation with E.R. Anderson ()
Sun, 6/7/2026 | 5:00pm - 6:00pm | Virtual

Happy Pride Month Eve to all our freaks and geeks. Looking for a way to support the work of Charis Circle through another year of community programming? Our campaign is live and linked in our bio! The donation window runs from now through June 4th at midnight! Read on for more information.

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Since 1996, Charis Circle has worked alongside the South’s oldest feminist bookstore, Charis Books and More (founded in 1974), to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices.

Charis is one of the most robust, visible, and accessible (both physically and economically) LGBTQ-centered social justice spaces in the country. As trends come and go, we bring our decades of lived experience to the fight for our lives, our words, our freedom. We were out and proud long before it was safe(r).

We are trans-inclusive, anti-racist, multi-generational, anti-capitalist feminists regardless of the political or economic consequences.

We believe in your right to be weird, to be difficult, to be inconvenient, to be unpalatable, or to simply not perform.

In our internal shorthand, Charis is here to center the freaks and the geeks. It’s our joking way of affirming the principle that when our most marginalized folks within our larger LGBTQ umbrella are served, centered, and cherished, all q***r and trans folks will flourish.

Q***r and trans people are under attack here in Georgia and around the U.S. so we have invested even more of our energy and resources in supporting the health and well-being of trans kids, teens, parents, and adults. We host 4 groups each month devoted to trans people in addition to being the South’s premier destination for trans authors to celebrate their books.

We added a new staff role this year, Assistant Director of Community Engagement, to respond directly to your non-book programming needs. Already in 2026, we hosted mixers, support groups, indie film screenings, parties, and DIY workshops, and there are lots more to come!

Charis is an essential and historic “third space” in Metro Atlanta that asks you to come as you are, share what you wish, and take what you need.

We are uniquely able to speak and act freely because 80% of our income comes from our community members in increments of $10-$100 at a time. We don’t take money from people who seek to control the kinds of speakers we invite or the popular education programs we create for our community.

But that means we really need everyone’s support. We have grown our staff and infrastructure to support all of the programming and events we host, but in order to remain the community space you love and rely on, we need your help.

For Give Out Day, we are raising a minimum of $10,000 to support our Charis Circle community programming.

Please consider making a gift in honor of a fabulous feminist in your life or in memory of a q***r or trans ancestor who shaped the world in the direction of justice. We need spaces to strategize, organize, connect, and dream the feminist future we all deserve. No gift is too small to help in this fight!

Together with our partner, Charis Books and More, we host more than 300 events a year. Most of them are free or donation based and most of them are also accessible online from wherever you live in the world. There’s never been a better time to plug into community.

Join us today: https://www.giveoutday.org/organization/charisbooksandmore-CharisCircle

Primary: After and With Alma Thomas by Alexis Pauline Gumbs () () is out on September 29th, 2026, and we are so excited to be offering SIGNED COPIES with pre-orders placed through Charis. Pre-order your copy today at the link below and save the date for our launch event on Tuesday, September 29th!

Pre-order: https://charisbooksandmore.com/book/9780300279306

Alma Thomas, born in rural Georgia in 1891 at the height of lynching, was deeply impacted by the cruel calculus of color in the context of American racism. Yet she chose to become a painter and educator who used color to support the creative visions of Black children and to reimagine earth and space on her own terms.

Although some critics have seen Thomas’s emphasis on beauty, color, and abstract art as a way to divorce her work from her life as a Black woman, Alexis Pauline Gumbs reveals how Thomas’s art was, in fact, deeply rooted in the Black community in which she lived. Black, in other words, was one of Thomas’s primary colors.

In this volume of poems and prose, Gumbs becomes a student of Thomas, allowing the wonder in Thomas’s work to open her to wonder about her own creativity, sistering, daughtering, and practice of communal transformation.

A high school matchmaker learns a lesson about love. A rebellious spaceship pilot defies his culture’s compulsory coupling. A boy magically transforms banned romance novels into living dragons. A teen immune to romance, and the zombie virus, fights to survive the apocalypse. Being Aro is full of stories throughout real and imagined worlds that cross genres and disrupt the status quo.

These twelve stories showcase aromantic people breaking generational curses, finding acceptance, and protecting the vulnerable while highlighting the infinite ways people find connection and love without romance

Charis welcomes editor Rosiee Thor and contributors: Kalyn Josephson, Kemi Ashing-Giwa, and Claudie Arsenault for a panel discussion celebrating Being Aro: A Collection of Aromantic Fiction about Love, Connection, and Empowerment.
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This event is virtual on Crowdcast! Please register at the link below:
https://charisbooksandmore.com/event/2026-05-26/being-aro-collection-aromantic-fiction-about-love-connection-and-empowerment