Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, a new memoir from Associate Professor Shane McCrae, is coming this summer from Simon & Schuster.
McCrae’s book, subtitled A Memoir of A Kidnapping, tells the chilling story of his childhood when at the age of three he was stolen from his Black father by his white supremacist grandparents. In order to separate him from his Blackness, they concealed the truth of his identity for years. In this memoir, McCrae pieces together the truth of his history and reunites with the parts of himself that were taken from him so brutally.
“[The memoir] wouldn’t have happened without my wife, Melissa, my editor, Topher Richards, or my agent Alice,” McCrae said via Twitter. “I’m happy and still shocked.”
Associate Professor Hilton Als praised the memoir, saying, “Shane McCrae’s powerful, indelible poet’s voice has now extended to the memoir, and how fortunate are we that the very things that distinguish his verse—truth-telling, sharp observation, more than a sense of the moment, profundity worn lightly—grace his harrowing and enlightening tale about race, and what makes an American family, and why. An essential story for our times.”
Pulling the Chariot of the Sun will be released in August and is available for preorder now.
Shane McCrae is the author of several books of poetry, including In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award; Sometimes I Never Suffered (FSG, 2020), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; and his most recent collection, Cain Named the Animal (FSG, 2023). McCrae is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize. He received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a JD from Harvard Law School, and an MA in Literary Studies from the University of Iowa.
