At the end of the spring 2017 semester, we mark the retirement of two poets in the English Department: Professor Robin Becker and Senior Lecturer James Brasfield.

On the heels of these longtime faculty  members’ departures, we are happy to report the addition of two poets to the creative writing program in the fall 2017 semester.

Shara McCallum  will join the Penn State creative writing faculty as a full-time professor after serving as the Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell.  McCallum received her BA from the University of Miami, her MFA from the University of Maryland, and her PhD in Poetry and African American and Caribbean Literature from Binghamton University. She is the author of The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems, This Strange Land, Song of Thieves, The Water Between Us, and the recently published Madwoman. McCallum’s poems have appeared in publications in the US, the UK, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Israel, and have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, and Romanian. Recognition for her work includes a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress and a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, among other awards.

Lee Peterson, Director of the Writing Commons and Instructor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State-Altoona, will serve as a visiting faculty member at University Park this fall. She will teach  ENGL 513, Advanced Poetry Writing. Peterson received her BA from Oberlin College in women’s studies and English literature and her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in creative writing. Her poetic, research, and community interests center around issues of human rights, the experiences of women and girls in wartime, and trauma and recovery. Her poetry collection Rooms and Fields: Dramatic Monologues from the War in Bosnia  won the 2003 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize.