Jos Charles

Jos Charles (born November 14, 1988) is an American poet, writer, translator, and editor.

Charles grew up in a conservative, Evangelical Christian family. She wrote her first poem, about the Crucifixion, when she was seven years old. Charles received a Masters in Fine Arts degree from the University of Arizona.

Charles' debut poetry collection, Safe Space was published in 2016 by Ahsahta Press. Her poetry has been published by POETRY, PEN, Washington Square Review, Denver Quarterly, GLAAD, and LAMBDA Literary', The Feminist Wire, Action Yes, BLOOM, and The Capilano Review. In 2015 she received the Monique Wittig Writer's Scholarship.In 2016 Charles received a Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship through the Poetry Foundation and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. In 2017 she was the winner of the National Poetry Series. On August 14, 2018 their poetry book feeld was published by Milkweed Editions. She is the founding editor of THEM, the first trans-literary journal in the United States. Charles' writing uses an original vocabulary that is created by blending together Middle English and textspeak.

Charles is a transgender woman. As of 2018, she lives in Long Beach, California and attends the University of California Irvine as a PhD candidate in English.

In June 2019, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, an event widely considered a watershed moment in the modern LGBTQ rights movement, Queerty named her one of the Pride50 "trailblazing individuals who actively ensure society remains moving towards equality, acceptance and dignity for all queer people".