Charif Shanahan

Charif Shanahan is the author of two books of poetry: Trace Evidence: Poems (Tin House, 2023), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and long-listed for the National Book Award in Poetry; and Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing: Poems (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry / Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, among other journals. His work has also been anthologized in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020); American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018); and elsewhere.

Shanahan is the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions, including a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and residency fellowships from Cave Canem, Hawthornden, La Maison Baldwin, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

About Shanahan’s work, the judges for the 2024 Whiting Award wrote:

In these elegant poems, Charif Shanahan sets out to discover how a person should live . . .  love turns itself, in his hands, into a crucible to understand other truths—about race, sexuality, belonging. These urgent questions are explored with reserve and exactitude, granting us a clarity that’s profound.

Shanahan is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA graduate creative writing programs. Originally from the Bronx, Shanahan has lived transnationally in Italy, Morocco, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom and currently resides on the South Side of Chicago.