Shane McCrae is the author of several books of poetry, including In the Language of My Captor, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award, Sometimes I Never Suffered, which was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and his recent collection, Cain Named the Animal. McCrae is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.