Charif Shanahan

Charif Shanahan is the author of two poetry collections, Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, and winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award; and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award.

Shanahan’s 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 been anthologized in American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018), edited by Tracy K. Smith, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020), edited by Kevin Young.

Shanahan is a recipient of the Whiting Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco, and residency fellowships from Cave Canem, La Maison Baldwin in St Paul de Vence, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He earned a BA from Princeton University, an MA from Dartmouth College, and an MFA from New York University. 

In 2023, Shanahan served as guest editor of Poetry magazine. 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.