Shane Book

Shane Book’s debut collection, Ceiling of Sticks, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, and was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. He has published more than 100 poems in two chapbooks, fifteen anthologies and over forty literary magazines in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. He was educated at New York University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Book is the recipient of scholarships to Cave Canem, the Naropa University Summer Writing Program, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, Brazil’s Sacatar Foundation and the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. His awards include a New York Times Fellowship in Poetry, The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a National Magazine Award. He has worked as a policy analyst for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, rickshaw puller, high school teacher, line cook, communications consultant, landscaper, grocery clerk, feature film script supervisor, film actor, film editor, and entrepreneur. He was Writer-in-Residence at Randolph-Macon Women’s College and has taught film, literature, and creative writing at New York University, the University of Iowa, Temple University and Stanford University. He recently directed a film based on Ceiling of Sticks and is now concurrently working on a documentary film and a fiction film.