Poets & Writers Theater

“What surprised me was that I discovered I enjoyed it sometimes: writing prose.” In this Books Are Magic event, Shane McCrae speaks with Patricia Smith and reads from his debut memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping (Scribner, 2023), which is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this 92nd Street Y event, Ama Codjoe reads from her debut collection, Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), with an introduction by poet Nkosi Nkululeko, followed by Carl Phillips reading from his latest collection, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), with an introduction by poet Shane McCrae. Phillips won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his collection.

In this video, Shane McCrae reads his poem “Jim Limber on the Gardens of the Face of God” from his collection Sometimes I Never Suffered (Corsair, 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize.

“The keeper put me in the cage      with the monkeys / Because I asked to be / Put in the cage with the monkeys.” Shane McCrae, whose most recent collection, In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), is longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award in poetry, reads his poem “Panopticon” for the River Styx at the Tavern reading series.

"I think ritualizing the act of writing is extremely dangerous to being a writer, because it's really easy to make the ritual the art, and you don't even notice it." Shane McCrae talks with fellow poet Dora Malech about tradition, accesibility, and process for Iowa City's Little Village magazine. McCrae's poetry collection The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015) is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.