Shane McCrae
Shane McCrae (born September 22, 1975, Portland, Oregon) is an American poet, and is currently Poetry Editor of "Image". McCrae was the recipient of a 2011 Whiting Award, and in 2012 his collection "Mule" was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a PEN Center USA Literary Award. In 2013, McCrae received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He received a Lannan Literary Award in 2017, in 2018 his collection "In the Language of My Captor" won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and in 2019 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. His poems  have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including "Best American Poetry", "American Poetry Review", "African American Review", "Fence", and "AGNI". Early life and education. Born in Portland, Oregon to a white mother and black father, his maternal grandparents kidnapped him when he was three years old and raised him to believe that his father had abandoned him. His grandfather was a white supremacist who abused him. They moved to California when he was 10 years old, and he grew up in Texas and California. He did not see his father again until he was 16. He dropped out of high  school and later earned a GED certificate and had a child at 18. He attended Chemeketa Community College. In 2002, McCrae graduated from Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. In 2004, he earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa in Iowa City. In 2007, he graduated from Harvard Law School with a JD. In 2012, he earned a Master of Arts from the University of Iowa. Career. McCrae was an assistant professor in the Creative Writing program at Oberlin College 2015–2017 and is an assistant professor in the Creative Writing MFA program at Columbia University. He is  the author of the poetry collections "Mule" (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), "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),  "The Gilded Auction Block" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), and "Sometimes I Never Suffered" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Awards. In 2011, McCrae received the Whiting Award, and in 2012 his collection "Mule" was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a PEN Center USA Literary Award. "The Animal Too Big to Kill" won the 2014  Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor's Choice Award. "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. McCrae received a Lannan Literary Award in 2018, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. "Sometimes I Never Suffered" was shortlisted for the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2020, McCrae received a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship.