Charif Shanahan was born and raised in the Bronx. He is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, PBS NewsHour, Poetry magazine, and elsewhere. His work has also been anthologized in American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018), Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern, 2019), and The BreakBeat Poets Vol 3: Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019).
On Being Named the Inaugural Gregory Pardlo Scholar
“It is my profound honor to have been named the The Frost Place’s inaugural Gregory Pardlo fellow. As a great admirer of Gregory’s work, I am humbled by the association this fellowship makes and hope, in some small way, to honor Gregory’s name while in residence at The Frost Place. I so look forward to joining my fellow workshop participants and to working with faculty poets Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Ilya Kaminsky, and director Patrick Donnelly, for whose work, like Gregory’s, I have deep appreciation and admiration.”
Shanahan is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco, and residency fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, the Frost Place, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony for the Arts, La Maison Baldwin, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among other honors and awards.
Shanahan has taught poetry at California College for the Arts (CCA), Collegio di Milano (Italy), New York University, and Stanford University, where he is currently a Jones Lecturer in Poetry.