Shane McCrae was born in Portland, Oregon. The son of a white mother and a Black father, he was kidnapped at age three by his maternal grandparents. McCrae grew up in Texas and California and reunited with his father at sixteen. After dropping out of high school, he became the first college graduate in his family. He attended community college and earned his BA at Linfield College, going on to receive an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a JD at Harvard Law School, and an MA at the University of Iowa.
McCrae’s thirteen published poetry works include Mule (2011), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a PEN Center USA Literary Award; Blood (2013); The Animal Too Big to Kill (2015), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award; In the Language of My Captor (2017), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award; and Sometimes I Never Suffered (2020), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Maya Angelou Book Award, and the Rilke Prize. He is also the author of Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping (Scribner, 2023).
McCrae’s work has been featured in publications including Best American Poetry, Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, African American Review, Fence, and AGNI. His honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Michael Marks Award, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, NYSCA/NYFA, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
McCrae is Poetry Editor of Image. He was previously an assistant professor in Oberlin College’s writing program. He lives in New York City and teaches creative writing at Columbia University.
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More Shane McCrae
Text: Read poems by McCrae at the Academy of American Poets
Video: McCrae is interviewed by Furious Flower about his influences
Text: McCrae speaks with Adroit Journal about writing formal verse
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Photo by Matthew Thompson.