Shane McCrae

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Shane McCrae is the author of nearly a dozen books of poetry, including Two Appearances After the Resurrection (Omnidawn, 2025); New and Collected Hell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), a book-length poem; The Many Hundreds of the Scent (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023); Cain Named the Animal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), a finalist for the Forward Prize; Sometimes I Never Suffered (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), a finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Rilke Prize; In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award.

McCrae is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award, the 2023 Arthur Rense Poetry Prize, the 2022 Michael Marks Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

McCrae teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.