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’s poems appear widely, in such journals as The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and PBS NewsHour. His work has been anthologized in American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018), Furious Flower’s Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern, 2019), and African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020).

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.

Born in the Bronx to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother, Shanahan holds an AB in Comparative Literature from Princeton University; an AM in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College; and an MFA in Poetry from New York University. Former Programs Director of the Poetry Society of America, he has taught poetry at California College of the Arts (CCA), the Collegio di Milano (Italy), and Stanford University.