Morgan Parker and Charif Shanahan

Morgan Parker

Morgan Parker is the author of Magical Negro (Tin House), There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Tin House) and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books). Her debut young adult novel Who Put This Song On? will be published by Delacorte Press in late 2019, and her debut nonfiction book is forthcoming from One World.

Her poetry and essays have appeared in Tin House, the Paris Review, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Best American Poetry 2016, the New York Times and The Nation. She won a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, 2016 Pushcart Prize and Cave Canem graduate fellowship. She is the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel. With Tommy Pico, she curates the Poets With Attitude reading series, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective.

Parker received her bachelor’s degree in anthropology and creative writing from Columbia University and her Master of Fine Arts in poetry from New York University. She lives in Los Angeles.

Charif Shanahan

Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. His poems have appeared in New Republic, New York Times Magazine, Poetry and Poem-a-Day of the Academy of American Poets as well as on PBS NewsHour.

Shanahan’s work is anthologized in American Journal: 50 Poems for Our Time (Graywolf, 2018), edited by U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, and Furious Flower Poetry Center’s Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2019). A Cave Canem graduate fellow, he studied poetry at Princeton University, Dartmouth College and New York University, where he earned his Master of Fine Arts.

Former programs director of the Poetry Society of America, he has received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Fulbright Program/IIE and Millay Colony for the Arts. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, he is now a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.

Photos by Rachel Eliza Griffiths