Penn State poet, professor, and Penn State Laureate Shara McCallum will offer a reading as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. 

The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, February 3. Originally scheduled as in-person, this event will no longer be offered in-person. Instead, you can join Shara for a reading and discussion of her most recent book, No Ruined Stone, by joining the Zoom event (set up as an interactive meeting rather than webinar). Registration is required in advance, and you can register here.

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, including “No Ruined Stone” (2021). McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the US, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Israel. “La historia es un cuarto/History is a Room,” an anthology of poems selected from across her six books and translated into Spanish by Adalber Salas Hernández, was published in 2021 by Mantis Editores in Mexico. In addition to Spanish, her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, and Dutch and have been set to music by composers Marta Gentilucci and Gity Razaz. 

Awards for her work include the Silver Musgrave Medal, the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize (for her previous book, “Madwoman”), a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (for her first book, “The Water Between Us”). 

“No Ruined Stone” imagines what might have happened if poet Robert Burns had sailed from Scotland in 1786, as planned, to take a job on a slave plantation in Jamaica. According to poet Adrian Matejka, “the 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.” 

McCallum has taught creative writing and literature at various universities. She is on the faculty of the Pacific Low-Residency MFA and an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. McCallum was appointed the 2021-22 Penn State Laureate. During her tenure as Laureate, McCallum is delivering readings & events throughout the Commonwealth, US, & internationally, in person and virtually, and is hosting the weekly radio show “Poetry Moment” on NPR affiliate station WPSU. 

 The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series is a program offered by Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English. The series receives support from the College of the Liberal Arts; the Department of English; the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment; the Mary E. Rolling Lectureship in Creative Writing; and University Libraries.