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]