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 both the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020) and American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018).

Shanahan is the recipient of various other 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.