Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (SIU Press, 2017), winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. He holds degrees in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and Dartmouth College and an MFA from New York University.
His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Baffler, Barrow Street, Boston Review, Callaloo, Literary Hub, New Republic, Poem-a-Day of theAcademy of American Poets, Poetry International, and Prairie Schooner, which awarded him the 2015 Edward Stanley Poetry Award. His translations from German and Italian have appeared in Circumference, A Public Space, and RHINO Poetry, among other publications, and have been performed by the Vienna Art Orchestra.
For his work, he has received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Frost Place, the Fulbright Program, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Starworks Foundation. A 2016 nominee for the Puschart Prize, he is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.
Born and raised in the Bronx to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother, Charif has extensive international experience and has lived in Argentina, Italy, Morocco, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. From 2012-2015, Charif was Programs Director of the Poetry Society of America. Charif has taught creative writing, literature, and language at Dartmouth College, the Collegio di Milano (Italy), International House (Europe, North America), New York University, and Stanford University.
Author photo: Justin Hoch