LA Book Launch: TRACE EVIDENCE by Charif Shanahan

929 South Broadway,Los Angeles CA 90015

11 May, 2023

Description

This event is co-sponsored by The Offing and Beyond Baroque! Pro Bono ASL will provide interpretation services for deaf and hard of hearing guests.In this LA Book Launch, co-sponsored by Skylight Books at the Ace Hotel, Charif Shanahan presents new poetry collection Trace Evidence with guest readings by Safia Elhillo, Morgan Parker, and Paul Tran! Following the readings, Shanahan will discuss Trace Evidence with Paul Tran. Hors d'oevres will be served; cash bar available. The event will take place on the 2nd floor, in Segovia Hall. About the Book In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. At the collection’s center sits “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a poem that chronicles Shanahan’s survival of a devastating bus accident in Morocco, his mother’s birth country, and ruminates on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate. With rich lyricism, power, and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and excavates the vestiges of our violent colonial past in the most intimate aspects of our lives. In a language yoked equally to the physical and metaphysical worlds, the poet articulates the need we all share for real intimacy and connection, and proves, time and again, that the true cost of our separateness is the love that our survival requires. About the Author Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, a Lambda Literary Award and Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award Finalist. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, PBS NewsHour, and Poetry. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Stegner Fellowship Program, and the Fulbright Commission. An Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, Charif lives in Chicago, Illinois.