In 2026, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Charif Shanahan discusses his curatorial approach and his own creative work.
Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, editorial director at the Academy. And I’m here today with the Guest Editor for August, Charif Shanahan. Charif is the author most recently of Trace Evidence. Charif, welcome and thank you for joining me today.
Charif Shanahan: Thank you so much for having me, Mary.
Poets.org: I hope you’re keeping cool [laughs] during what’s been … [laughs]
Shanahan: I am.
Poets.org: ... a brutal summer. Glad to hear it [laughs].
Shanahan: I’m doing my best.
Poets.org: Yeah.
Shanahan: Yes.
Poets.org: Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for August?
Shanahan: I cast a wide net. I wanted the month to consist of poems that were powerful, excellent. I joked with friends, I said, “I want every poem to be a banger.” And so, I just reached out to lots of poets. I was surprised to hear from poets who just reached out and introduced themselves and offered up work for consideration. And when I take editorial positions or when I’m working in an editorial capacity, part of what feels important to me is diversity of aesthetic and voice. The various ways that poems can make meaning, seems like an important commitment to me to uphold in editorial work. So, that’s never far off from how I’m thinking about selection or curation. And part of what began to happen naturally, and I knew that it would, and it’s always a surprise how it happens, but I expected that it would happen, which is that there were these sort of organic through lines. These thematic through lines or echoes that organically began to develop as I received and read poems.
And so, for example, there were a number of elegies that I received. But the elegies were forward-looking, which is to say that they perhaps emerged from grief, but were looking ahead into the future. And there’s a poem by Kazim Ali, an elegy to his mother. A new poem by Morgan Parker, who has been writing these really incredible, deeply moving poems that I feel privileged to have seen, you know, outside of this capacity, just in our friendship, to a friend of hers that she lost last year. There was an elegy to a dog, even, by a poet named Kristin Lueke who has not yet published a book, a full-length collection. She’s published some chapbooks and is a really terrific voice that I hope people will continue to listen to more. And, you know, across these elegies, what the work of these elegies did, I think in some ways was put a spotlight, especially on Kazim’s poem on how absurd life can be in the face of unimaginable loss. And that the only thing we really can do is integrate the loss to the best of our ability and proceed anew, proceed as new. And we are, of course, changed by that which had changed us and then left us. The departure is an additional change. And, you know, I think the poem by Ada Limón that really articulated part of the work that was happening in these elegies and perhaps all elegies, there was a line, “every elegy is a love poem and every love poem / is an elegy.” I think the speaker’s friend said this to her. “Every elegy is a love poem and every love poem / is an elegy. But there must be a difference.” And I sat with that question, you know, that implicit question inside the statement, there must be a difference, and thought about that for a while. So, yeah, I think that’s what I’d initially offer up in response to the question.
Poets.org: Now I’m going to be thinking about that difference for a while [laughs]. Because we perceive love as something that we take with us eternally. But is that really true? Because all of our relationships ultimately are destined to end.
Shanahan: They must. Yeah. I think the relationship with self. People talk about your relationships with your siblings as being unique, in the sense that they are the longest relationships an individual will have in their lives. You’re born more or less at the same time, maybe, and your lifespans are likely to be close to the same length. There’s the relationship with the self, which could maybe be argued as longer. But I don’t think that that is in fact true, because we become so many different people in our lives. And we might have the same name and the same body more or less, but we are changed by the loss. And so, part of what that makes me think about, I think of this poem by Linda Gregg, who was one of my first teachers. I was very blessed as an undergraduate to study with Yusef Komunyakaa and then Linda Gregg [laughs]. And I got very, very different experiences and lessons from each of them.
But I remember, I think it was the very first poem. In fact, I know it was the very first poem of Linda’s that I read. It’s a poem called “Asking for Directions,” from her book called Chosen by the Lion. And it’s this really moving poem about the speaker of the poem’s final moments with her lover, as lovers on a train ride. And it’s a long train ride between Chicago and Manhattan, per the first line of the poem. And the final moment is the speaker. And it’s important, too, to the poem to say that the lover of the speaker is married. And this is an extramarital affair that the two of them have had for a long time. And the lover gets off the train when they arrive in the station and has ten minutes to meet his family and leave, per the poem. And the speaker gets up and puts on a vest that the lover left for her, and her jacket and got her bag. And turning, looking through the window, saw the lover standing outside looking up at her. And the poem says, “That moment is what I will tell of as proof / that you loved me permanently. After that, I was / a woman alone carrying her bag, asking a worker which direction to walk to find a taxi,” and the poem ends.
And, you know, I think I was maybe nineteen when I read that poem for the first time. And it made me question exactly what you’ve just expressed, you know, that we think of love as eternal and permanent. And that is separate and apart from whether we get to keep it or keep it in the form that it has expressed itself. That she is certain leaving this relationship that his love for her is permanent, they have changed each other, he has changed her, she has changed him. And yet the expression of that love will be different moving forward. It will perhaps feel less available. It will certainly be less present in the day-to-day experience of her life, but maybe not, because maybe it’s been integrated in a deep way such that her life and how she lives it is different. So, I think there are really rich questions around permanence and loss and being changed by love and receiving love, as opposed to possessing it. And so, these were questions that came up.
Poet.org: Very interesting questions. And maybe that’s the thing to consider, that the shape of it is what changes. We don’t really gain or lose. It’s the form. It takes on a different form as we move through life. Because I think about the people I’ve loved. I still love them, but it has a new shape. It’s a different kind of love.
Shanahan: Yes. And sometimes we have to love at a distance [laughs].
Poets.org: Indeed [laughs]. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Now, if you can direct our readers and listeners to one poem or more than one poem, in our collection at Poets.org, that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?
Shanahan: I think the poem that I would most like to direct your readers to is a poem called “My Love Is Black” by my friend DéLana Dameron, who transitioned late last year, in November of last year. I discovered the poem in 2018, I think, in Matthew Shenoda’s curation of Poem-a-Day. I think it appeared possibly even the day after a poem of my own in that curation. And DéLana and I met in graduate school and had a literary friendship, a friendship in poems. And since her passing, I have been rereading her work, and thinking in particular about this remarkable ability that she had to inspire people into living freer and more authentic lives. I mean, it was really astonishing the way that she would galvanize people into themselves. And everyone who knew her closely or closely enough that she might have that impact that I know has expressed to me that she has had that impact.
And so, I’m thinking about that in the course of a short life, forty years on this Earth, and the kind of meaning in the influence that her life has and continues to have. And so, I would direct your readership to this poem, “My Love Is Black,” in an effort to honor the memory of my friend and also the ongoing experience of Curtis, her husband, as he integrates unimaginable loss.
Poets.org: And what are you reading now?
Shanahan: Well, I have just spent a few days rereading everything by Linda, actually, as I think I mentioned a moment ago. So, I like to do that every few years with her work. And I find myself doing that a few times a year actually with poets who have become indispensable to me. I just read everything from book one, chronologically, usually to wherever they are. So, I have been reading Linda. A lot of my reading this spring into summer has been with these incredible graduate students at UC Irvine that I had the privilege of working with in the MFA program. Really extraordinary poets who are making their way. So, I’m spending a lot of time with their work over the last several months. And then reading for prizes and things. Maybe that’s a little awkward to say, but books have reached me for prizes.
And so, I’ve greatly enjoyed ... This is just at random. Juliana Spahr’s Ars Poeticas was just so provocative and timely. And I greatly admire the work that she was doing in that work. I’m reading about astrology also. I have an astrology friend here in Chicago [laughs] who has convinced me that we all need to be paying much more attention to this ancient system of thought and guidance. And so, I’ve been reading books about that. I’ve returned to the work of this terrific poet, an Albanian-born poet who writes in Italian, named Gëzim Hajdari, whose work I’ve been translating. So, I’ve gone back to some of his earlier collections.
Poets.org: So, you’ve mentioned that you are judging prizes. What else are you working on in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?
Shanahan: I have been working on my third book of poetry and a memoir and a prose memoir. And those are my primary projects right now. And I’m having a lot of fun and exploring self, and memory, and love, actually, and loss, and what that means, and how we integrate it, how we move on, what it does to us. And those are coming along really beautifully. And I’m very happy with the work that I’ve been able to do in those two projects.
And I’ve also actually just started the final editorial pass on a book-length translation of a book by Gëzim called Corpo presente, which is the “Body Present” or “Present Body,” a book that he wrote in the late nineties about his experience of exile. He’s a poet of exile. These very stark moving poems, kind of organized around a motif, I think, of the body as homeland in the absence of nation. And that it becomes home. It is home and perhaps it is for all of us. So, those are the projects that I’m working on right now and thinking about and getting lost inside of.
Poets.org: In a 2023 interview in The Paris Review with Morgan Parker, you talked about working on an epistolary collection called “Dear Whiteness.” Is that the collection on which you’re working?
Shanahan: It is and it isn’t.
Poets.org: OK.
Shanahan: Yes, yes. Those poems that Morgan and I talked about, it’s funny actually, the first several pages of that epistolary was written around the time that I was ... or concurrent to my writing the poems that went into Trace Evidence. And as I was sitting with the body of work that I had generated before going out with Trace Evidence, and when I was putting Trace Evidence together, I came to see that that was perhaps its own project. There was, of course, overlap questions of racialized experience and racial constructs and the liminality of certain types of racialized experiences. And I saw that it was its own project and kind of pulled it out from the batch and put it to the side. Those pages were actually published by the L.A. Review of Books a long time ago. I think it was 2018 that those pages were published, but they weren’t part of Trace Evidence and I’ve continued to grow them.
And so, I have about thirty pages of epistolary that I initially thought would be the whole book. And that was when Morgan and I spoke, I think where I was. And now I’m beginning to see that perhaps it is a section in a different book. So, I don’t know yet, but it’s definitely part of what I’m working on. It’s part of what I’m living with creatively and thinking about creatively. I’ve also started writing a bit about the genocides and institutional power across scale and scope.
Poets.org: Very interesting. Also, during that interview, while talking about the lived experience of being racialized, and everyone is racialized, you said, “We are taught to see in a way that is particular to our cultural context.” I mean, I would add that access to both education and travel also impact how we view others and ourselves. I just had a conversation with Oliver Baez Bendorf, our July Guest Editor, about the experience of living in exile. He is another poet in exile. And the ways in which exile has impacted his worldview, the ways in which the experience has compelled him to focus in ways in which he didn’t really focus before, on mundane things even. You’ve spent a great deal of time living transnationally, which is, of course, a different experience than living in exile. But I’m very curious about what you have learned about yourself as a result of the living transnationally and how deeply living in places like Italy and Morocco, for example, have informed your work.
Shanahan: Yeah. There is a portion of the answer to that question that I am conscious of that I will share. And before I do, I also want to say that it’s very clear to me that that question is so enormous, that there will be parts of its answer that are unavailable to me, that I will be continuing to unfold and discover as I live my life wherever I live it, wherever I happen to be as I proceed. So, I feel so blessed and privileged to have been able to live in these various places. I grew up, of course, as you know, in a binational, bicultural, biracial, bi-religious home. And I was constantly questioning the primacy of any of those things, not just in relationship to who I was and what my experience was, but the larger environment around me. Of course, living in the United States could mean both of those things equally, both of those cultural expressions, racial expressions.
But there was already a point of comparison that was necessarily happening for me as I grew up in the kind of home that I grew up in. And the experience of exile, you know, I didn’t hear the whole conversation, but I admire Oliver greatly and his work. And part of what I’ve been thinking about sitting with Gëzim’s poetry of exile is how many different expressions it can take, and what the assumptions are that others might have about what it means to be in exile or what exile looks like.
And there are exilic experiences, I believe, that are happening psychologically, that are fully invisible to people. And would probably be difficult to account for to people who maybe had a different set of expectations or assumptions. Or are looking at an individual’s exilic experience through a different lens that might eclipse the exilic component of the experience. And so, I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that vis-a-vis race, I had an experience for a long time that was marked by a kind of exile. And I say that with great care and sensitivity to the more demonstrative expressions of exile, the more dangerous in a life and death sort of way, in an immediate kind of way in that regard. And one of the things that I found when I lived abroad, when I moved to London, which was the first ... I’d gone to Morocco as a child and I had had experiences there, but I relocated with no indication that I was necessarily going to come back to the United States, no plan to return to the United States when I moved to London. And part of what began to happen for me, Mary, was that this feeling of otherness that I had lived with suddenly had an organic explanation. It made sense that I was other because I was in fact other. The cause of the otherness within the context of the United States changed in primacy when I went to London, where I was the American guy, the guy from New York. Oh, the guy with the Moroccan mum, you know … where the question of race in a U.S.-American context fell to the side. And I was embodied in a way that allowed that to happen, where it was part of the privilege that I possess in my particular embodiment that that could occur. And it did. And it was profound to see that the rubric almost, or the immediate touchstones of identity in these foreign contexts shifted with the foreign context, with the culture, with the national history, such that the aspects of myself that were immediately identifiable or the markers of reference changed.
And that changed my interior experience, which is why I’ve spent so much time thinking about the way that the systems in which we live inform the most intimate aspects of our relationship with ourself and our most intimate relationships. How does white supremacy or racial constructs writ large affect a mother and a child, is a question that clearly I’ve pursued at great length across these two books, when they are reared in different cultural contexts, in different nations that would acculturate us differently. So, the time such that we see differently and the way that we look and receive the world is different in a categorical sense. There will always be the individual distinction.
So, I think the time abroad has been indispensable to me. And I still write about experiences that I had fifteen years ago abroad. Memories still come up for me where I think, wow, that was so every day. In the context at the time it felt so every day. And now I see, actually, now that I’ve returned here how layered it was. So, yeah, I hope that answers the question.
Poets.org: It does indeed.
Shanahan: Okay, great. Great.
Poets.org: Those who have lived abroad will understand deeply and intuitively what you mean. What a great conversation. This has been—
Shanahan: Thank you, Mary. Yeah.
Poets.org: —And your month of curation has so many heavy hitters. It’s going to be really exciting [laughs].
Shanahan: I’m excited to share it with everybody. I was so blessed that I was able to have the chance to do that and put it all together for folks. So, great. Thank you for the opportunity and thank you for making the time to talk today.