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, forthcoming this year
April 2026, Peepal Tree Press (UK) & September 2026, Alice James Books (US)
Praise for Behold
Few contemporary poetry books begin with such unabashedly epic, rhapsodic, prophetic a voice as Shara McCallum’s Behold. From here the journey takes us through Jamaica of the poet’s childhood to ways of perceiving the interior—in museums, galleries, art studios of the world. This formally inventive book is a singing in defense of deeper contemplation. Having seen the “surreal landscape of history’s graveyard” and understood “what it means to be a refugee in your own country” the poet gives us wisdom. Through McCallum’s clarity of perspective, her musical, memorable clarity, the soul stands apart, sees and is seen. With unrelenting honesty, here is a book that proposes we take a step back from the shallowness of our age and open our eyes—as the many painters and landscapes the poet finds herself in front of do—to behold the world that is ours. Behold. Behold. This is a beautiful, soul-making book.
—Ilya Kaminsky
Shara McCallum’s Behold is the kind of book that first stunned me into the abiding love I have for language. At once mystical, political, and lyrical, these poems redraw the boundaries of what we might consider the limits of human insight. Poems like these remind us that, if there is ever to be a fully realized awakening in terms of our relationship to history, we need poetry.
—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. In her poetics of looking, which is to say reverence, she listens to these works the way Tina Campt teaches us to listen to images: not only for what they show, but for their sonic frequencies—for what hums beneath, what whispers, what reverberates. Each poem is an object lesson in the root of curating, curare—to care: to gather what has been abandoned, to tend to grief through beauty, to attune to those silenced in the archives—the laborers in cane fields, the children left behind, the ancestors bound by red threads. McCallum also listens as others witness—the security guards, so often unseen in their quiet labor, who imbue their favorite works of art with their own lived histories. To behold art shaped by migration is to witness both beauty and wound, rupture and repair. And yet, in its poetics of migration, Behold teaches us not all of migration’s wounds must be made visible; at times, looking and listening closely means resting with opacity.
— Grace Aneiza Ali, Curator