Please join us for this in-person offsite event celebrating the release of TRACE EVIDENCE by Charif Shanahan. For this event, Charif will be joined by poets Ari Banias, Adrian Matejka, Erika L. Sánchez, and avery r. young for a reading. This event is located offsite at Haymarket House at 800 Buena Ave. Doors open at 6:30 PM for cocktails, followed by a 7 PM reading and book signing.

This is a ticketed event. By registering for a ticket, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.

REGISTER FOR TICKETS HERE!

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.

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.

Ari Banias is the author of A Symmetry (2021), winner of the 2022 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans & Gender Variant Literature, and Anybody (2016), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award. His poems appear in American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Hyperallergic, Kenyon Review, Poetry, A Public Space, The Nation, The New Republic, Triple Canopy, The Yale Review, and in We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). His work has been supported by Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship program. Ari lives and teaches in the Bay Area.

Adrian Matejka grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana and is a graduate of Indiana University Bloomington and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of many books including The Devil’s Garden, Mixology, The Big Smoke, Map to the Stars, Somebody Else Sold the World, and his first graphic novel Last On His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century, published in February 2023. He’s received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and United States Artists. He served as Poet Laureate of  the state of Indiana in 2018-19. He currently lives in Chicago and is Editor of Poetry magazine.

Erika L. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was published by Graywolf in July 2017, and was a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. Her debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, published in October 2017 by Knopf Books for Young Readers, was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Awards finalist. It is now is being made into a film directed by America Ferrera. Most recently Sánchez published a critically acclaimed memoir-in-essays titled Crying in the Bathroom with Viking Books. Sánchez was a Fulbright Scholar, a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent fellow from the Poetry Foundation, a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, a 2018 recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and a 2019 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz chair at DePaul University in Chicago.

Interdisciplinary artist and educator avery r. young [him, him, his] is a Leader for a New Chicago 2022 awardee, a Cave Canem fellow and a co-director of The Floating Museum.   His poetry and prose have been featured in BreakBeat Poets, Teaching Black, Poetry Magazine and alongiside images in photographer Cecil McDonald Jr’s, In The Company of Black.  He is the composer and librettist for a new commissioned work from The Lyrics Opera of Chicago titled safronia.  HIs full length recording tubman. is the soundtrack to his collection of poetry, neckbone: visual verses.

Accessibility: Haymarket House is fully accessible and has a wheelchair ramp entrance through our back entrance off Clarendon. All our restrooms are gender neutral and fully accessible.. Masks are required for attendees for the main program in the event. Please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com for any questions or accessibility requests.

Image Description: A light green graphic banner with the faint background of open books. To the right, a large photo of the author, CHARIF SHANAHAN, next to a smaller image of the book cover. The text reads, “Women & Children First Presents Charif Shanahan, Thursday, April 6, 7pm CT, Ticket required for entry, Haymarket House, 800 W Buena Ave.”

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Tags: Adrian Matejka, Ari Banias, avery r. young, Charif Shanahan, Chicago, Edgewater, Erika L. Sánchez, Haymarket House, TRACE EVIDENCE, TRACE EVIDENCE by Charif Shanahan, Women & Children First Bookstore