Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence: poems (Tin House, 2023), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry; and 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 is an Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University.

Shanahan is the recipient of the Whiting Award; a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry; a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco; and residency fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation in Griante, Italy, the MacDowell Colony, La Maison Baldwin in St Paul, France, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among other awards and recognitions.