Charif Shanahan

Charif Shanahan is the author of two poetry collections: Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023) and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. Shanahan is the guest editor for the summer 2023 issues of Poetry magazine.

Shanahan’s poems have appeared in the Nation, the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018), edited by Tracy K. Smith, and African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020), edited by Kevin Young. 

Shanahan is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; the Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University; a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco; and residency fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony for the Arts, La Maison Baldwin, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He earned a BA from Princeton University, an MA from Dartmouth College, and an MFA from New York University. Currently, he 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.