From Jamaica, and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US & UK, including No Ruined Stone. 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, will be 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. “Moving Still,” a composition by Gentilucci, premiering in September 2021 the Biennale in Venice, includes McCallum’s original text and her performance of the same. Awards for McCallum’s work include the Silver Musgrave Medal, for outstanding merit in the field of literature, from the Jamaican government; the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, for her previous book Madwoman; a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the US Library of Congress; a National Endowment for the Arts 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. McCallum delivers readings, lectures, and workshops at universities and literary festivals in the US and internationally and has taught creative writing and literature at various universities. She is presently on the faculty of the Pacific Low-Residency MFA and is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. McCallum was appointed the 2021-22 Penn State Laureate. (Website: sharamccallum.com) 

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.