Charif Shanahan

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Charif Shanahan 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. He teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA programs at Northwestern University. Shanahan’s poems appear in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, PBS NewsHour, and Poetry. His work has recently 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), The BreakBeat Poets Vol 3: Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and the Library of America’s forthcoming African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. 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; the Gregory Pardlo Fellowship from the Frost Place; and residency fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, 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. Born in the Bronx to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother, he has extensive international experience and has lived in Argentina, Italy, Morocco, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. 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 New York University. 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. Source

Preface

A blackstart bathes

in the deep shade of the lagoon,

six toes sinking into mud.

 

There is hope in the past.

 

I am calling out your name

all the time. I am calling

 

with both voices,

night and day.

Published:

2017

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2021

Themes:

Memory & The Past

Literary Devices:

Antithesis

a person or thing that is the direct opposite of someone or something else

Personification

the attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing

Sensory Detail

words used to invoke the five senses (vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell)