Join poet and translator Charif Shanahan as he reads from his celebrated new collection, Trace Evidence. 

“Charif Shanahan is examining race and sexuality in ways I have not seen… A necessary voice.” ―Natasha Trethewey

Born in the Bronx to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother, Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry (2024), the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry (2024), and a Whiting Award (2024), and was Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), his meditative and trenchant debut which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award.

In arresting lyric poems, Shanahan centers the racial periphery and explores the impact of our colonial pasts (and present) on the most intimate aspects of our lives. In their citation, the Whiting Award judges said of Trace Evidence: “Charif Shanahan sets out to discover how a person should live. His laboratory is the fierce, complex pull of attachment and separation from his mother, his family, his beloveds; love turns itself, in his hands, into a crucible to understand other truths — about race, sexuality, belonging. His lyrics confront subjects from eros’s intimacies to encroaching violence. These urgent questions are explored with reserve and exactitude, granting us a clarity that’s profound.” Ocean Vuong praised Trace Evidence as “astute, subversively reserved, and propulsive… a truly magical achievement.”

“A master of shaping his dialectic through lyrical groundwork. Calm and potent.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Lyrical and unforgiving…a rare kind of poet.”—Ilya Kaminsky



“Revelatory and pulsating with truth, Trace Evidence is a dangerously wise book of poems. Each poem is full of muscular music and meticulously carved out of longing as they ask, not just why we live, but how we live, and for whom. Wholly human and deeply rooted in attention, this book is for anyone who has ever questioned where they belonged.” ―Ada Limón



Image Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths