Charif Shanahan

Charif Shanahan is an American poet and translator. His debut poetry collection Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017) was the recipient of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, selected by Allison Joseph, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. His second collection, Trace Evidence: poems (Tin House, 2023), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and is a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, his second Lammie nomination.

Education
Shanahan earned an BA in Comparative Literature 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, where he studied with Sharon Olds and Yusef Komunyakaa, with whom he had first worked as an undergraduate at Princeton.

Career
Shanahan is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA programs. Previously, he taught at Stanford University, where he held both a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry and Jones Lectureship in Poetry. His work has also been anthologized in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020), Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2019), and American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018).

As a translator, he works primarily from Italian. His translations of Italian-language poets Gëzim Hajdari and Donata Berra have been published in Circumference, A Public Space, and RHINO Poetry.

Awards and honors

 * Whiting Award (2024).
 * Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry (2024).
 * Trace Evidence Poets & Writers's "New and Noteworthy 2023.
 * National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2019)
 * MacDowell Poetry Fellow (2019)
 * Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Poetry Fellow (2019)
 * James Baldwin Writer-in-Residence, La Maison Baldwin, St. Paul de Vence (2018)
 * Finalist, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry (2018)
 * Finalist, Thom Gunn Award, Publishing Triangle (2018)
 * Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, Stanford University (2016–18)
 * Gregory Pardlo Fellowship, The Frost Place (2016)
 * Millay Colony for the Arts Fellow (2016)
 * The Edward Stanley Award, Prairie Schooner (2016)
 * Cave Canem Foundation Fellowship (2013–15)

Books

 * Shanahan, Charif (2017). Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing: poems. Carbondale. ISBN 978-0809335770.
 * Shanahan, Charif (2023). Trace Evidence: poems. Portland, Oregon. ISBN 978-1953534668.