Shane McCrae

Shane McCrae grew up in Texas and California. He earned a B.A. from Linfield College, an M.A. from the University of Iowa, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He serves as an associate professor in Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program and lives in New York City.

"What I’m interested in…is hopefully writing poems that are linguistically interesting. Everybody fantasizes that the next avant-garde is the thing that they’re doing, and I suppose I’m no different. I would like—I guess the dream would be that if anybody were thinking about me twenty years from now…that nobody would think—people wouldn’t think that I was stagnating, I guess. That would be nice…[H]opefully people will not think that I am just a follower of current trends. That would be nice. Hopefully people will think that I’m in communication with what’s going on but also trying to see beyond it."

— Excerpt from Oral Memoirs of Shane McCrae,
Baylor University Institute for Oral History

McCrae is the author of several poetry collections, including Cain Named the Animal (2022), a finalist for the Forward Prize; Sometimes I Never Suffered (2020), a finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Rilke Prize; and In the Language of My Captor (2017), which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

McCrae’s other honors include the Lannan Literary Award, the Michael Marks Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.