Charif Shanahan

Charif Shanahan writes poetry, translates literature, and teaches, with work that considers mixed-race identity, family, belonging, and the limits of inherited categories. Tin House issued Trace Evidence: Poems during 2023 as his second collection. Its central long poem, “On the Overnight from Agadir,” reflects on a serious bus accident Shanahan survived in Morocco while conducting genealogical research. Across the collection, personal memory meets questions of Arabness, Blackness, queerness, colonial history, intimacy, and mortality. The title borrows forensic language for material left by contact, an image Shanahan uses to ask what experience makes visible and what it leaves difficult to name. His first collection, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Trace Evidence later received the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award, alongside major national shortlist recognition. Shanahan teaches creative writing at Northwestern University and has also translated poetry from Italian.