Shane McCrae is an award-winning African-American poet and writer whose work often addresses the black experience in the US. Poetry for him was a way of making sense of his difficult and abusive upbringing. As a child, Shane was raised by his white maternal grandparents in a deeply racist household. His grandmother taught him the Nazi salute, told him that he “tanned very easily” and that he was living with her because his black father didn’t want him. But when Shane was a teenager, he would learn the truth about the racial prejudice and deception that divided him from his father Stanley.

Shane's latest collections of poetry are called Sometimes I Never Suffered and The Gilded Auction Block.

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Presenter: Emily Webb
Producer: Maryam Maruf

Picture: Shane McCrae as a child
Credit: Courtesy Shane McCrae