Shane McCrae (born September 22, 1975, Portland, Oregon) [1] is an American poet, and is currently Poetry Editor of Image . [2]
McCrae was the recipient of a 2011 Whiting Award, [3] and in 2012 his collection Mule was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award [4] and a PEN Center USA Literary Award. [5] In 2013, McCrae received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. [6] He received a Lannan Literary Award [7] in 2017, in 2018 his collection In the Language of My Captor won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, [8] and in 2019 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. [9]
His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry , American Poetry Review , African American Review , Fence , and AGNI . [3]
Born in Portland, Oregon to a white mother and black father, he was kidnapped by his maternal grandparents when he was three years old and raised him to believe that his father had abandoned him. [10] His grandfather was a white supremacist who abused him. [10] They moved to California when he was 10 years old, [1] [11] and he grew up in Texas and California. [12] He did not see his father again until he was 16. [10]
He dropped out of high school and later earned a GED certificate and had a child at 18. [11] [10] He attended Chemeketa Community College. [1] In 2002, McCrae graduated from Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. [13] In 2004, he earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa in Iowa City. [14] In 2007, he graduated from Harvard Law School with a JD. [14] [12] In 2012, he earned a Master of Arts from the University of Iowa. [14]
McCrae was an assistant professor in the Creative Writing program at Oberlin College 2015–2017 [15] and is an assistant professor in the Creative Writing MFA program at Columbia University. [16]
He is the author of the poetry collections Mule (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), [17] Blood (Noemi Press, 2013), Forgiveness Forgiveness (Factory Hollow Press, 2014), The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), [18] The Gilded Auction Block (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), Sometimes I Never Suffered (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) Cain Named the Animal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), [19] and Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping (Scribner, 2023). [20]
In 2011, McCrae received the Whiting Award, [3] and in 2012 his collection Mule was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award [4] and a PEN Center USA Literary Award. [5]
The Animal Too Big to Kill won the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor's Choice Award. [21]
In the Language of My Captor was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award and a winner of the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. [8]
McCrae received a Lannan Literary Award [7] in 2018, and a Guggenheim Fellowship [9] in 2019.
Sometimes I Never Suffered was shortlisted for the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize. [22]
In 2020, McCrae received a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. [23]
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