The Nation Poetry Reading Series: Maggie Smith, Charif Shanahan, and Omotara James

A virtual reading featuring poets from the Nation magazine’s pages hosted by Nation Poetry Editor Kaveh Akbar on June 29, 2023.

Maggie Smith is the author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, an instant New York Times bestseller, and five other books of poetry and prose: Goldenrod, Keep Moving, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Lamp of the Body. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, and more. She lives in Ohio with her two children.

Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence: poems (Tin House, 2023) and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. Charif is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA graduate creative writing programs.

Omotara James is the author of Song of My Softening (Alice James Books 2023). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, BOMB Magazine and elsewhere. She has received support from the African Poetry Book Fund, New York Foundation for the Arts, Lambda Literary and Cave Canem Foundation. Currently, she writes, teaches and edits poetry in New York City.