Charif Shanahan with Luther Hughes and Jane Wong

Chicago poet Charif Shanahan visits Seattle on the occasion of his second published collection of poetry Trace Evidence. Two acclaimed local poets who have both read their poetry on Elliott Bay’s stage, Jane Wong and Luther Hughes, will join in the celebratory night of poetry. In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. At the collection’s center sits “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a poem that chronicles the poet’s survival of a devastating bus accident in Morocco, his mother’s birth country, and ruminates on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate. With rich lyricism, power, and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and excavates the vestiges of our violent colonial past in the most intimate aspects of our lives. In a language yoked equally by the physical and metaphysical worlds, the poet articulates the need we all share for true intimacy and connection, and proves, time and again, that the true cost of our separateness is the love that our survival requires. Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, a Lambda Literary Award and Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award Finalist. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, PBS NewsHour, and Poetry. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Stegner Fellowship Program, and the Fulbright Commission. An Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, Charif lives in Chicago, Illinois. Luther Hughes is the author of the debut poetry collection, A Shiver in the Leaves (BOA Editions, 2022), and the chapbook Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), recommended by the American Library Association. He is the founder of Shade Literary Arts, a literary organization for queer writers of color, and co-hosts The Poet Salon podcast. Recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, his writing has been published in American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Orion, and more. He was born and raised in Seattle, where he currently lives. Jane Wong is the author of two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). Her debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, is forthcoming from Tin House in May 2023. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, the Jentel Foundation, and others. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.

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Website: https://go.evvnt.com/1583714-0

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