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 most recently Behold (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, Chinese, 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 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 and a 2026-27 Cheney Creative Fellow at the University of Leeds.
McCallum’s most recent book, BEHOLD
Praise for BEHOLD
McCallum (Madwoman) delivers a sensitive reflection on visual art—especially by contemporary Caribbean, Black, and women artists—in her beautiful latest…This skillful collection uncovers the intersection of art’s public and private dimensions.
—Publisher’s Weekly
In poems that address the concerns of the present age by calling for deeper and more focused attention, Behold confirms McCallum’s powers as a veteran poet of compassionate meaning.
—Trinidad Daily Express
This formally inventive book is a singing in defense of deeper contemplation…Behold. Behold. This is a beautiful, soul-making book.
—Ilya Kaminsky
These poems are fiercely intelligent and musically alert, attentive to seeing as a form of thought.
—Hannah Lowe
At once mystical, political, and lyrical, these poems redraw the boundaries of what we might consider the limits of human insight.
—Tim Seibles
In Behold, Shara McCallum moves as a curator would, assembling a museum of migration’s afterlives—art haunted by the spectral presence of those of us grappling with migration’s wake.
— Grace Aneiza Ali, Curator
Media for BEHOLD
Alaska Quarterly Review Reading Series
The Poems We Made Along the Way