From Jamaica, and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US and UK. Her most recent, No Ruined Stone, won the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize. McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the US, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. La historia es un cuarto/History is a Room, an anthology of her poems translated into Spanish by Adalber Salas Hernández, was published in 2021 in Mexico. In addition to Spanish, McCallum’s poems have been translated into French, Italian, Romanian, Turkish, and Dutch and set to music by composers Marta Gentilucci and Gity Razaz. Awards for her work include the Silver Musgrave Medal from the Jamaican government, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the US Library of Congress, and an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, among others. McCallum is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor at Penn State University and a faculty member in the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA Program. From 2021-22, she served as the Penn State Laureate. She is a 2023-24 Guggenheim Fellow.

Website: www.sharamccallum.com

“Through this rich landscape of plausible unreality, McCallum examines the very real way that historical forces, like slavery and colonialism, shaped and continue to shape individuals who exist within the wake of those circumstances. … Isabella's attempt to reconcile the facets of her identity is the same project we all undertake when, whether through necessity or the luxury of choice, we confront history honestly. No Ruined Stone is a timely invitation to do just that, revealing however painfully, that none of us chooses his inheritance.”
—Katherine Watkins, Shining Rock Poetry Anthology & Book Review

“If history is one type of form, McCallum achieves with this book an entering into it, recharging it with an imagination and urgency that speak to contemporary realities and the effects of colonialism and slavery. McCallum delivers compelling characters whose language may be of an older time, but whose motives staggeringly mimic modern minds.”
—Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Magma Poetry

“The force of this collection lies in its ability to graciously share painful truths—burdens inherited by the descendants of enslaved Africans, and the strong tide of societal erasure, the fierce momentum sustained through generations to bury the facts, though they continuously demand to be reckoned with.”
—Rooja Mohassey, Adroit Journal

"The collection is rigorous and curious about the poet’s ‘obsessions and vexations, including with Romantic poetry and the Enlightenment’s ideals and occlusions; with absent fathers, mothers, and countries; with migration, exile, and memory.’"
—Lucy Sheerman, Long Poem Magazine

"McCallum’s writing is polished, formal, in keeping with the romantic literary register of the time. It’s beautiful smoothness and crisp form can often lull you into almost missing the painful truths of this collection of letters and soliloquies in verse."
—Desirée Seebaran, Moko Magazine

“McCallum’s free-verse monologues make no attempt to imitate the language of polite regency society or Burns’s poetic forms (quite properly: Burns is inimitable). But an occasional Scotticism or characteristically Jamaican turn of phrase — and, at one point, a Ghanaian lullaby — remind the reader that the institution of chattel slavery was not merely an economic regime, but a site of cross-cultural exchange.”
—Mark Scroggins for Hyperallergic

“McCallum’s collection, through a strong commitment to craft and narrative, grapples with race, violence, colonialism and inheritance. No Ruined Stone is striking and unsettling in all of the ways I love my art.”
—Chet’la Sebree for The Lily

“How we confront the shadows of the past is at the heart of Jamaican poet Shara McCallum’s No Ruined Stone, an evocative collection of speculative narrative poetry inspired by a trip to Scotland, where she unearthed records revealing that the country’s most celebrated poet, Robert Burns, once booked passage on a ship to work on a slave plantation in Jamaica.”
—Angela María Spring, Washington Independent Review of Books

“McCallum employs a diction and style that is historically situated while managing to avoid caricature; the light sprinkle of Scots is used shrewdly to great effect in a sequence that brings Scotland and Jamaica together, layering the figure of the bard with that of the colonizer… While it asks us to consider a more complex version of Burns’s creative legacy and inheritance, and to examine our responsibility for the past, No Ruined Stone also contributes to the broader and timely discourse surrounding the history of colonialism, slavery, and abolition unfolding in Scotland.”
—Jay G Ying for Harriet Books

“At a time when not only the United States but also many other places are reckoning with the legacy of slavery and the systemic racism that remains, this remarkable collection by a brilliant poet, whose ancestry reflects all her characters, will be one of this year's essential books.”
—Gregory Luce, Scene4

”Shara McCallum’s magnificent sixth book mythologizes the poet Robert Burns and his imagined Jamaican descendants through a chorus of intergenerational voices. This collection is timely and timeless as it reframes the complicated genealogies created by colonialism. Erasure is one of the colonizer’s most insidious tools and McCallum’s gorgeous monologues serve to reclaim the voices ignored, unsaid, and unclaimed because of colonialism. These poems offer an intricate history more honest and unforgiving than the tidy myths we’re content to live with.”
—Adrian Matejka, author of Map to the Stars

“No Ruined Stone imagines what might have happened if Robert Burns had sailed from Scotland in 1786, as planned, to take a job on a slave plantation in Jamaica. Supported by research, it is a subtle, multi-layered verse narrative, voiced mainly by the poet himself and later by his granddaughter, passing for white. The worlds it vividly presents beget reflections on creativity, history, slavery, race and many other issues. It is an exceptional work, a memorable achievement.”
—Mervyn Morris

“Shara McCallum brings her gorgeous poetics to a story of slavery and colonialism, challenging the historical archive's sheer, unyielding wall by going not over or around it, but fearlessly through. In musical, evocative language, her poems imagine the what-if-that-almost-was of Scotland's best-loved Bard, following Burns into the life he might have lived as a plantation overseer in Jamaica—then seeing his enslaved granddaughter back to Scotland to claim a life reserved for white women.”
—Evie Shockley