Charif Shanahan

“A master of shaping his dialectic through lyrical groundwork. Calm and potent.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Lyrical and unforgiving…a rare kind of poet.”—Ilya Kaminsky  

“Revelatory and pulsating with truth, Trace Evidence is a dangerously wise book of poems. Each poem is full of muscular music and meticulously carved out of longing as they ask, not just why we live, but how we live, and for whom. Wholly human and deeply rooted in attention, this book is for anyone who has ever questioned where they belonged.” ―Ada Limón  

“Charif Shanahan is examining race and sexuality in ways I have not seen… A necessary voice.” ―Natasha Trethewey

Born in the Bronx to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother, Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry (2024), the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry (2024), and a Whiting Award (2024), and was Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), his meditative and trenchant debut which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award.

In arresting lyric poems, Shanahan centers the racial periphery and explores the impact of our colonial pasts (and present) on the most intimate aspects of our lives. In their citation, the Whiting Award judges said of Trace Evidence: “Charif Shanahan sets out to discover how a person should live. His laboratory is the fierce, complex pull of attachment and separation from his mother, his family, his beloveds; love turns itself, in his hands, into a crucible to understand other truths — about race, sexuality, belonging. His lyrics confront subjects from eros’s intimacies to encroaching violence. These urgent questions are explored with reserve and exactitude, granting us a clarity that’s profound.” The collection has received wide praise for its ability to pursue universal spiritual questions through the lens of our most urgent social issues, with remarkable lyric precision: the result is a deeply poignant meditation on human separateness, rooted equally in the physical and metaphysical worlds, that reaches beyond constructed social divisions to our shared humanity. Ocean Vuong praised Trace Evidence as “astute, subversively reserved, and propulsive… a truly magical achievement.”

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 Cave Canem Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation in Griante, Italy, the MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, La Maison Baldwin in St Paul, France, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among other awards and recognitions.

Shanahan’s poems appear widely, in such journals as American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and PBS NewsHour. His work has been anthologized in American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018), Furious Flower’s Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern, 2019), and African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020).

He holds a BA in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing from Princeton University; an MA in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation from Dartmouth College; and an MFA in Poetry from NYU’s Graduate Creative Writing Program. Former Programs Director of the Poetry Society of America, he has taught literature and language at California College of the Arts (CCA), the Collegio di Milano (Italy), New York University, and Stanford University. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University.

Short Bio

Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence (2023), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry (2024), the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry (2024), and a Whiting Award (2024), and was Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (2017), his meditative and trenchant debut which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, PBS NewsHour, and Poetry. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Stegner Fellowship Program, and the Fulbright Commission. An Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, Charif lives in Chicago, Illinois.

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Trace Evidence

Poetry, 2023

“In these elegant poems, Charif Shanahan sets out to discover how a person should live. His laboratory is the fierce, complex pull of attachment and separation from his mother, his family, his beloveds; love turns itself, in his hands, into a crucible to understand other truths — about race, sexuality, belonging. His lyrics confront subjects from eros’s intimacies to encroaching violence. These urgent questions are explored with reserve and exactitude, granting us a clarity that’s profound.” –Whiting Award Selection Committee

In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. At the collection’s center sits “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a poem that chronicles Shanahan’s survival of a devastating bus accident in Morocco, his mother’s birth country, and ruminates on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate. With rich lyricism, power, and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and excavates the vestiges of our violent colonial past in the most intimate aspects of our lives. In a language yoked equally to the physical and metaphysical worlds, the poet articulates the need we all share for real intimacy and connection, and proves, time and again, that the true cost of our separateness is the love that our survival requires.

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Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing

Poetry, 2017

In this affecting poetry debut, Charif Shanahan explores what it means to be fully human in our wounded and divided world. In poised yet unrelenting lyric poems, Shanahan—queer and mixed-race—confronts the challenges of a complex cultural inheritance, informed by colonialism and his mother’s immigration to the United States from Morocco, navigating racial constructs, sexuality, family, and the globe in search of “who we are to each other . . . who we are to ourselves.” With poems that weave from Marrakesh to Zürich to London, through history to the present day, this book is, on its surface, an uncompromising exploration of identity in personal and collective terms. Yet the collection is, most deeply, about intimacy and love, the inevitability of human separation and the challenge of human connection. Urging us to reexamine our own place in the broader human tapestry, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing announces the arrival of a powerful and necessary new voice.

Read What’s In Print

• 2024 Publishing Triangle Awards Winners Announced – Publishing Triangle

• 2024 National Book Critics Circle Finalists – Publishers Weekly

• Review Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan – The Poetry Question

• The Spiritual Fact of Our Oneness: A Conversation with Charif Shanahan – The Rumpus

• Charif Shanahan on Making the Unseen Seen through Poetry – Literary Hub

• The Ineffable Resonance: Safia Elhillo interviews Charif Shanahan – mizna

• If You Are on This Earth You Are of This Earth: On Charif Shanahan’s Trace Evidence – LA Review of Books

Listen to Audio

• Poetry Unbound with Charif Shanahan: Present Moment – OnBeing

• Marie Howe and Charif Shanahan on Ecopoetics, Spirituality, and Losing Oneself – Poetry Foundation

• Ada Limón reads “Song” by Charif Shanahan– The Slow Down

• What does it mean to be multiracial in America? This poet explores how it’s complicated – PBS NewsHour

• Charif Shanahan Reads “Thirty-seventh Year” – The New Yorker

• Charif Shanahan : Trace Evidence – Between the Covers Podcast

• The Action of Love: A Conversation with Charif Shanahan – The Paris Review

• Read “Fig Tree” by Charif Shanahan – Poetry Foundation

• Read “Ligament” by Charif Shanahan – New York Times

Trace Evidence

When I say But mother, Black or not Black,
Of course you are polyethnic, your look does not change
Though it does harden, a drying clay bust
Abandoned or deliberately incomplete,
All the features carved in
Except the eyes. What I’m trying—
I mean—You are an Arab, yes,
By culture, by language, and in part by blood; by blood
You are also Black African—and when, then, I say
And also probably a fair amount of European, too—the lights,
Though we’re standing at the corner of 195th and Jerome,

Turn up somehow

Tracing an outline of you onto the armory’s sharp red brick, the El
Barreling up from the tunnel like a surge of magma reaching
For air and as I wait for it to pass so that you can
Hear me again, so that I can hear myself at last
Say But here, for me, that doesn’t exactly matter. Don’t you see—?
Your face hangs on the fair of fair amount—heavy drops
Of oil, or old rain, falling onto us from the tracks—almost willing away
The layer of long-dead men flattened onto it, and the desperate
Rest of you, until I say with my looking
Through the unbearable human noise, My darling sweet mother, it is
Fine, it is fine. For us here now I will be the first of our line.

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Award-winning Poet
Lambda Literary Award
Whiting Award

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