Shara McCallum is from Jamaica, of Jamaican and Venezuelan parentage. She is the author of seven books of poetry, published in the US & UK, including her recent, Behold, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; 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 Book Prize. Recognition for McCallum’s work includes a Guggenheim Fellowship, Musgrave Medal, NEA Poetry Fellowship, Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, among other awards. From 2003-2017, McCallum served as Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry and, from 2021-2022, the Penn State Laureate. A 2026-2027 Cheney Creative Fellow at the University of Leeds, McCallum directs the Creative Writing Program at Penn State, where she is a Sparks Professor of English.
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
Behold confirms McCallum’s powers as a veteran poet of compassionate meaning.
—Trinidad Daily Express
The collection is a praise hymn to close attention, soulful contemplation and, for the reader, a curated voyage of discovery.
—The Scotsman Magazine
This formally inventive book is a singing in defense of deeper contemplation.
—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
T.S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Announcement
Alaska Quarterly Review Reading Series
Love the Words, Radio Interview
The Poems We Made Along the Way, Podcast
Plume, Conversation with Mihaela Moscaliuc