Shara McCallum

McCallum was born in Kingston, Jamaica to an African Jamaican father and a Venezuelan mother.[2] Her family migrated to the United States when she was nine. She graduated from the University of Miami, from the University of Maryland[3] with an M.F.A., and from Binghamton University in New York with a PhD.[4] She has taught at the Stonecoast MFA program.[5]

McCallum directs the Stadler Center for Poetry and taught creative writing and literature at Bucknell University.[6][7] McCallum is now a professor of English at Penn State University. She lives in Pennsylvania with her family.[8]

McCallum's work has appeared in The Antioch Review,[9][10] Callaloo,[11] Chelsea, The Iowa Review, Verse, Creative Nonfiction, Seneca Review,[12] and Witness.

Shara McCallum's first collection, The Water Between Us, is a book of poetry that expresses the torments and glories of growing up. McCallum's poems are startling in their breadth of experience and language. From the beginning McCallum asks to free people's expectations with her epigraph, "Only the magic and the dream are true. All the rest's a lie".[13]

• 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
• Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant
• Tennessee Individual Artist Grant in Literature
• 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry[1]
• Poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.[2]
• Bynner award from the Library of Congress.[1]
• 2018 OCM Bocas prize for Caribbean Literature for poetry.[1]

Full-length poetry collections

• The Water Between Us. University of Pittsburgh Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-8229-5710-2.
• Song of Thieves. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2003. ISBN 978-0-8229-5813-0.
• This Strange Land (Alice James Books, forthcoming)[14]
• Madwoman (Alice James Books 2017)[15]

Nonfiction

• Emmanuel Sampath Nelson, ed. (2000). "Mary Church Terrell". African American authors, 1745–1945. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-30910-6.

Anthology publications

• Michael Collier, ed. (2000). The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology Series. University Press of New England.
• E. Ethelbert Miller, ed. (2002). Beyond the Frontier. Black Classic Press. ISBN 978-1-57478-017-8.
• Billy Collins, ed. (2003). Poetry 180: a turning back to poetry. Random House Trade Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-8129-6887-3.
• Kei Miller, ed. (2007). New Caribbean poetry: an anthology. Carcanet. ISBN 978-1-85754-941-6.

• "An Interview with Shara McCallum", Smartish Pace, Magdelyn Hammond
• "Shara McCallum, Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry", YouTube
• "For Rachel, Just before Speech", ars poetica
• "The Art Room", Poetry Foundation
• "Matins". Ploughshares. Spring 2002. Archived from the original on 20 August 2006.
• "The News", Cave Canem