Perry Janes in conversation with Charif Shanahan: Find Me When You're Ready

In the powerful poetic debut (Curbstone Books, 2024), Perry Janes interrogates the myths we carry. The Detroit-based writer and filmmaker's lyric coming-of-age narrative traces a sweeping cross-country journey, driven by an interest troubling our creation stories, asking who built them, why we carry them, and how we might set them aside.

Perry Janes will be in conversation with Charif Shanahan, an Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern and the author of(Tin House, 2023), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry. Following a reading and discussion, both authors will be available for a book signing.

Perry Janes is a writer and filmmaker from metro Detroit, Michigan. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, his written work has appeared in POETRY, Electric Literature, Poem-a-Day, and others. He earned his MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College, and his BA from the University of Michigan, where he was a 5-time recipient of the Hopwood Award. Perry's debut short film ZUG won a Student Academy Award from the AMPAS. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Read his interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books & about his recent feature film project on Deadline Hollywood.

Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: and , which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. Shanahan’s poems appear widely, in such journals as The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and PBS NewsHour. Shanahan is the recipient of the Whiting Award; a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry; and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco, among other awards and recognitions. Shanahan holds an AB in Comparative Literature from Princeton University; an AM in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College; and an MFA in Poetry from New York University. Former Programs Director of the Poetry Society of America, he has taught poetry at California College of the Arts (CCA), the Collegio di Milano (Italy), and Stanford University.

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