Spring 2024

Shane Book grew up in Canada and Ghana. His first volume of poetry, Ceiling of Sticks (University of Nebraska Press, 2010) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and was a Poetry Society of America “New Poet” Selection. Excerpts from Ceiling of Sticks received The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize and a National Magazine Award.

His second collection, Congotronic (USA: University of Iowa Press/ Canada: House of Anansi Press, 2014) won the Archibald Lampman Award, was a Kuhl House Poets Series Selection and was a finalist for the Canadian Authors Association Award, Ottawa Book Award, and Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry. Congotronic was a Poets and Writers Magazine “New and Noteworthy Book of 2014.” Excerpts from Congotronic were shortlisted for the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Faye Di Castagnola Award and included in The Best American Experimental Writing 2015.

His writing has been translated into Italian and Chinese, appears in many magazines in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, and has been reprinted in more than twenty anthologies, including Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, and The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry. He has read his poetry and given talks at venues around the globe.

His first short film, Dust (2013), screened at twenty-three film festivals worldwide, including the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, Santa Cruz Film Festival and Hollywood Black Film Festival. The recipient of many festival jury prizes, Dust also played at universities and high schools across North America and on television in Jamaica, Trinidad and the U.S. His second film, Praise and Blame, was released in 2017.

His other honors include a New York Times Fellowship; fellowships to the Telluride Film Festival, Cave Canem, Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the MacDowell Artists’ Colony, Brazil’s Sacatar Foundation, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and the Breadloaf Writers Conference; grants from the Canada Council, Chalmers Foundation, Wyncote Foundation, and Ford Foundation; an Academy of American Poets Prize; Southern Illinois University’s Charles Johnson Prize; a San Francisco State University Poetry Center Award; and a teaching award from New York University.