Shara McCallum

Professional Bio

From Jamaica, and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of seven books of poetry, published in the US & UK, including Behold (forthcoming 2026), No Ruined Stone, winner of the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and Madwoman, winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Poetry Prize for Caribbean Literature and the 2018 Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Book Club. McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the US, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. An anthology of her poems in Spanish, La historia es un cuarto/History is a Room, was published in 2021 in Mexico. In addition to Spanish, her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, and Dutch and set to music by composers Marta Gentilucci and Gity Razaz. Awards for McCallum’s work include a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Silver Musgrave Medal, for outstanding merit in the field of literature, from the Jamaican government; a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the US Library of Congress; a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry; the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction; and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for her first book The Water Between Us; among others. McCallum delivers readings, lectures, and workshops at universities and literary festivals in the US and internationally and has taught creative writing and literature at various universities. She is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and served as the 2021-22 Penn State Laureate.