Full-program video: Morgan Parker and Charif Shanahan: February 28, 2019
Highlight video clips: Charif Shanahan reads "Song" | Morgan Parker reads "If My Housemate Fucks with Me I Would Get So Real (Audition Tape Take 1)" | Charif Shanahan and Morgan Parker, on embodiment in poetry, "emotional intelligence," and a commitment to not writing "something that my aunties can't read" (Parker)
Parker’s Mood by Charlie Parker
I am only as lonely
as anybody else, I say
at lunch downtown, examining
my worth. It isn’t
summertime. At the end,
The Poetry Center is very pleased to present poets Morgan Parker and Charif Shanahan, performing their work and in conversation with one another and the audience. Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, this event is free and open to the public.
Morgan Parker is the author of Magical Negro, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (both from 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 book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World. Parker received her Bachelors in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University and her MFA in Poetry from NYU. 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 is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She is the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel. With Tommy Pico, she co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. She is a Sagittarius, and she lives in Los Angeles. More at morganparker.com
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, PBS NewsHour, Poetry, and Poem-a-Day of the Academy of American Poets, and anthologized in American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf, 2018), edited by US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, and Furious Flower Poetry Center's forthcoming 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 MFA. Former Programs Director of the Poetry Society of America, he has received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Fulbright Program/IIE, and Millay Colony for the Arts. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, he is currently a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.