Shane McCrae

Shane McCrae (born September 22, 1975, Portland, Oregon) is an American poet, and is currently Poetry Editor of Image.

McCrae was the recipient of a 2011 Whiting Award, and in 2012 his collection Mule was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a PEN Center USA Literary Award. In 2013, McCrae received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He received a Lannan Literary Award in 2017, in 2018 his collection In the Language of My Captor won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and in 2019 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, African American Review, Fence, and AGNI.

Early life and education
Born in Portland, Oregon to a white mother and black father, he was kidnapped by his maternal grandparents when he was three years old and raised him to believe that his father had abandoned him. His grandfather was a white supremacist who abused him. They moved to California when he was 10 years old, and he grew up in Texas and California. He did not see his father again until he was 16.

He dropped out of high school and later earned a GED certificate and had a child at 18. He attended Chemeketa Community College. In 2002, McCrae graduated from Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. In 2004, he earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa in Iowa City. In 2007, he graduated from Harvard Law School with a JD. In 2012, he earned a Master of Arts from the University of Iowa.

Career
McCrae was an assistant professor in the Creative Writing program at Oberlin College 2015–2017 and is an assistant professor in the Creative Writing MFA program at Columbia University.

He is the author of the poetry collections Mule (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), Blood (Noemi Press, 2013), Forgiveness Forgiveness (Factory Hollow Press, 2014), The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), The Gilded Auction Block (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), Sometimes I Never Suffered (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) Cain Named the Animal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), and Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping (Scribner, 2023).

Awards
In 2011, McCrae received the Whiting Award, and in 2012 his collection Mule was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a PEN Center USA Literary Award.

The Animal Too Big to Kill won the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor's Choice Award.

In the Language of My Captor was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award and a winner of the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

McCrae received a Lannan Literary Award in 2018, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019.

Sometimes I Never Suffered was shortlisted for the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize.

In 2020, McCrae received a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship.

Works

 * In Canaan, Milwaukee: Rescue Press, 2010. ISBN 9780984488919,
 * Mule, Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011. ISBN 9781880834930,
 * Blood, Noemi Press, 2013. ISBN 9781934819302,
 * Nonfiction, Pittsburgh, PA: Black Lawrence Press, 2014. ISBN 9781937854980,
 * Forgiveness Forgiveness, Hadley, MA: Factory Hollow Press, 2014. ISBN 9780983520313,
 * The Animal Too Big to Kill, New York: Persea Books, 2015. ISBN 9780892554645,
 * In the Language of My Captor Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2017. ISBN 9780819577115,
 * The Gilded Auction Block, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. ISBN 9780374162252,
 * Sometimes I Never Suffered, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. ISBN 9780374240813,
 * Cain Named the Animal, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. ISBN 9780374602857,
 * Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping, New York: Scribner, 2023. ISBN 9781668021743,
 * The Many Hundreds of the Scent: Poems, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. ISBN 9780374607197,