Poet and Professor Shara McCallum to Offer Reading January 25

 

Poet Shara McCallum will read as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on Thursday, January 25, at 7:30 p.m.

McCallum is the author of five collections of poetry: The Water Between Us (1999), Song of Thieves (2003), This Strange Land (2011), The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (2011), and Madwoman (2017). Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including The Antioch Review, Chelsea, The Iowa Review, and Verse. She was awarded the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize in 1998, Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress in 2013, a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant in Literature, and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

Publisher’s Weekly offers the following review of her latest poetry collection, Madwoman: “Her madwoman is neither a static nor predictable character, but a thunderous storm subject to unexpected change in severity; the madwoman is both nourished and destroyed by her memories.”

McCallum was born in Jamaica and moved to the U.S. at the age of nine. She received her B.A. from the University of Miami, her M.F.A. from the University of Maryland, and her Ph.D. in Poetry and African American and Caribbean Literature from Binghamton University in New York. McCallum was the Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell for ten years and now teaches creative writing and literature at Penn State University.

Mary E. Rolling Reading Series events are free and open to the public. The series is a project of Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English. It receives generous support from College of the Liberal Arts, the Department of English, the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, the Mary E. Rolling Lectureship in Creative Writing, and the University Libraries.

Article written by Andrea Noelle Brown

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