Shane Book is a poet and filmmaker. His first collection, Ceiling of Sticks, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and was a Poetry Society of America “New Poet” Selection. Excerpts from Ceiling of Sticks received The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize and a National Magazine Award.

His second collection, Congotronic, a University of Iowa Press Kuhl House Poets Series Selection, won the Archibald Lampman Award, and was a finalist for the Canadian Authors Association Award, Ottawa Book Award, and 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. It was also a Poets and Writers Magazine “New and Noteworthy Book of 2014.” Excerpts from Congotronic were shortlisted for the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and included in The Best American Experimental Writing 2015.

He earned a BA in Political Science from the University of Western Ontario, BA in Fine Arts from the University of Victoria, MA in English and American Literature from New York University, MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University, MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He has taught at various institutions including the University of California Berkeley, Western Kentucky University, and Stanford and has been Writer-in-Residence at Randolph College and in the MFA Program at Saint Mary’s College of California.

His writing has been translated into Italian and Chinese and appears in more than seventy magazines in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, and has been reprinted in over twenty anthologies, including Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets, Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, and The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry.

His first short film, Dust (2013), screened at twenty-three film festivals worldwide, including the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, Santa Cruz Film Festival and Hollywood Black Film Festival. The recipient of numerous film festival jury prizes, Dust also screened at universities and high schools across North America and on television in Jamaica, Trinidad and the U.S. His second film, Praise and Blame, will be released in 2016.

His other honors include a New York Times Fellowship; fellowships to the Telluride Film Festival, Flaherty Film Seminar, Cave Canem, Naropa University, MacDowell Artists’ Colony, Sacatar Foundation Brazil, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and Breadloaf Writers Conference; scholarships from the Ford Foundation and Wyncote Foundation; grants from the Canada Council; an Academy of American Poets Prize; the Charles Johnson Prize; San Francisco State University Poetry Center’s Rella Lossy Award; and a teaching award from New York University.