Book Launch: Charif Shanahan

Join us for the Bay Area launch of Charif Shanahan’s first full-length poetry collection, Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing. Readings by Ellen Bass, Grady Chambers, Matthew Siegel, Arisa White, and of course, Charif Shanahan. Music by Azuah! Book signing to follow readings and music.

Suggested donations of $5-25 collected at the door, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Wine, light snacks, and Red Bay Coffee will be made available.

Hope to see you there!

More about the book:

Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing: poems by Charif Shanahan

Winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, selected by Allison Joseph.

Forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press in February 2017.
Available for pre-order at Southern Illinois University Press and on Amazon.

Praise for Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing:

“Charif Shanahan’s Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing is a heroic first collection where an alert dialogue beckons us, and we risk entering. Here in these pages the politics of color is highly personal; in a time of bleaching creams and psychological erasures, where there’s an attempt to diminish the African, this poet confronts himself and family head-on, and in doing so, through wit and an astute sense of history, his poetry dares to affect the reader. These poems cross borders in the blood and through an imagination that challenges us. Each trope is made of feeling. We need Shanahan’s voice in this time of reckoning with ourselves as a complex nation, where each of us may understand implicitly when a speaker asks, ‘What pattern of occasion will free him?’”—Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of Water Clocks