Poet Shane McCrae Reads at Literature Evening

On Wednesday March 19th, poet Shane McCrae read his recent work in Tishman Lecture Hall. The event was hosted by the literature department at Bennington College.

Shane McCrae is the author of ten books of poetry, including the book length poem New and Collected Hell (FSG, 2025); The Many Hundreds of the Scent (FSG, 2023); In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize; and Mule (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010). His memoir Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping (Scribner, 2023) is a recounting of being kidnapped from his Black father and raised by his white supremacist grandparents. He is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.

An enthusiastic audience of Bennington College students, faculty, and guests attended this event, which started off with an introduction by Director of Poetry at Bennington, Michael Dumanis. According to the description of New and Collected Hell by Macmillan, “Shane McCrae, one of the most prophetic and powerful poetic voices of our time, has created a twenty-first-century epic in New and Collected Hell. As David Woo wrote in Poetry, “McCrae’s poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time…By seeking to heal the rift in his own identity, McCrae has listened intently to the literary echoes emanating from the English language and transmuted them through his own dynamic voice.” Here, he gathers new and previous work as a culmination of his long-standing poetic project: a new and unforgettable journey through Hell. McCrae’s work is indelible, and this collection brings his searing vision to new depths.”

Additionally, students were invited to attend two additional events featuring McCrae: first, a master class on Meter and Meaning in poetry at 3pm in Cricket Hill Barn and second, a Q&A about poetry and his memoir, facilitated by Michael Dumanis at 12:30pm in CAPA Symposium on March 20th.

The reading was followed by a short Q&A, and book signing. The copies of New and Collected Hell were sold in Tishman.