Charif Shanahan plans to read from his forthcoming second collection of poetry for this year's Eamon McEneaney Memorial Reading. The reading takes place on Thursday, March 18 at 7:00 p.m. ET. This virtual event is free and open to the public.
REGISTER HERE to attend!
“I’m motivated by the unifying potential of the lyric poem, the way a voice speaking subjectively from its own experience can reach across boundaries of all sorts (period, geography, race, culture, gender, sexuality, etc.) to the spirit of another, apparently ‘different,’ person.”
The reading will be followed by a live Q&A moderated by associate professor Joanie Mackowski.
Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award, and winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. The son of an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother, he was raised in the Bronx and educated at Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and New York University, where he earned an MFA in poetry. Shanahan’s poems appear in American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, PBS NewsHour, Poetry, and in the recent anthologies, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018; ed. Tracy K. Smith) and African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020; ed. Kevin Young). Shanahan is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University; and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco, among other awards and recognitions. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA programs at Northwestern University. Find out more at charifshanahan.com.
This reading is made possible by Eamon McEneaney’s Cornell teammates, family, and friends. In addition to being one of Cornell’s most talented and best-loved athletes, Eamon McEneaney ’77 was a dedicated husband and father, loyal friend, prolific writer and poet, and an American hero. He died on September 11, 2001, in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
This is the third virtual event in the Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: Together. Next up in the series is a Reading by Camonghne Felix on April 8 at 7:00 p.m. ET. For more information and ongoing updates, visit english.cornell.edu/zalaznick or email creativewriting@cornell.edu. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.
Inset photo of Charif Shanahan by Justin Hoch
Pano photo of Charif Shanahan by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
