From Jamaica, and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of seven books published in the US and UK, including Behold, forthcoming in 2026, No Ruined Stone, winner of the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and Madwoman, winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Caribbean Poetry Prize and the 2018 New England Poetry Club Motton Prize. McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the US, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Asia; have been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, and Dutch; and have been set to music by composers Marta Gentilucci and Gity Razaz. Recognition for her work includes a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Musgrave Medal, a Witter Bynner Fellowship, an NEA Poetry Fellowship, the Oran Robert Perry Burke Nonfiction Award, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, among others. From 2003-2017, she was the Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry. From 2021-22, she served as the Penn State Laureate. McCallum delivers readings, lectures, and workshops throughout the US and internationally and has been on the faculty of several universities and low-residency MFA programs. She is presently an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State.
McCallum’s recent book
Winner of the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry
Praise
“No Ruined Stone…is arresting, lyrical, wrestling with colonialism, racism, and the knotted legacy of slavery.”
— The Boston Globe review of No Ruined Stone
“…McCallum beautifully incorporates the patois of her native Jamaica and employs myth as a way to deal with the mistakes and hurts of the past. McCallum’s striking poems take the madwoman out of her attic so that she may walk and speak among the living.”
—Publishers Weekly starred review of Madwoman
“These are poems of ruin and rebirth, of the joys and damage a mother knows: “Rock and stone// are different words which mean the same when flung;/ beauty delivers its own kind of wound.” Lovely to read, McCallum’s poetry is constructed partly of proper Queen’s English and partly of Jamaican patois, and their blending effectively translates the narrator’s quest to save history, to refuse to let it repeat itself, to define and redefine motherhood and who she is. “Where are you, mother,/ now the spell is broken?// ~ Daughter, I am the dark in your eye.” VERDICT This is a marvelous collection filled with a lovely and evocative music. Highly recommended.
—Library Journal starred review of This Strange Land