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

“McCallum’s new poems mark a terrific quantum leap in maturity, complexity, and depth. [This Strange Land] appears to be a determined fusion of past and present, of general and personal history, towards a collective memory that would encompass us all.”
—Michela A. Calderaro

“This Strange Land poignantly and appropriately begins with ‘Psalm for Kingston,’ a poem that calls out to a violent city and its resilient inhabitants. The voices of Kingston…are brought up and left to fade into the fabric of the verse… It is a fitting way to introduce a book that is in search of what feels almost lost and yet ever-present.”
—Thom Dawkins, Weave Magazine

“These are poems of ruin and rebirth, of the joys and damage a mother knows…This is a marvelous collection filled with a lovely and evocative music. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“Jean Rhys could be the presiding spirit of this moving collection, which mines deep veins of loss and displacement. The personal and the political converge in new ways in these finely crafted poems, and readers should be prepared for unexpected turns and genuine surprises.”
—Lorna Goodison

“This Strange Land is a remarkably accomplished book, ranging from childhood to parenthood, Jamaica to America, in a way that feels integrated and organic. With mature hindsight, Shara McCallum revisits early experience with a piercing clarity (even in dialect, as in the wonderful ‘Miss Sally’ poems), exposing its undercurrents in the present. Intimate, serious, and beautifully crafted, these poems scrutinize the griefs and beauties of familial life and memorialize them with meticulous care.”
—Chase Twichell

“Chinua Achebe spoke of a literature of the future in which the ‘horizon extends to include all the world.’ Shara McCallum’s dazzling new work brings that oceanic sky-line close. Exploring the specifics of a marginalized culture, she challenges and deepens the idea of the universal. She has the poet’s gift to complicate your stance towards your own language and times. This Strange Land might turn out to be home after all—McCallum’s creation is not just an overwhelmingly real place, but a confrontation with history, an exploration of the maelstrom of the family, and a poetics of extraordinary lyricism and urgency.”
—D. Nurkse