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

“…[Madwoman] has earned my very highest recommendation and praise.”
—Karen Craigo, Literary Mama

“[In Madwoman]. . .madness becomes enmeshed with the politics of (in)visibility and (un)belonging.”
—Wasafiri

“…Shara McCallum collapses the binary definition of woman as either angel or monster, reclaiming the madwoman as a mythic force…She is wildly complex, ferociously ambiguous.”
—The Pleiades Book Review

“McCallum’s words linger so that we may pick them up again, examine them like thoughts or whispers.”
—Rain Taxi

“Madwoman may be semi-autobiographical (most poems are), but, certainly, it reflects those voices living on the margins of society, voices full of authenticity, truth and lived experience but which are often unheard. Shara McCallum reminds us they are worth hearing by bringing us into their complex world.”
—Poetry Matters

“In a major way, McCallum peels off the layers of what it is to be a woman. She jettisons poetic forms and can exact poetic norms without waiting for a reaction.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books

“McCallum’s poems read like a woman with an embroidery needle, looking out at the horizon while very attuned to the pattern she is creating with her thread.”
—Opal Palmer Adisa

“Female identity and cultural heritage entwine in this fierce, skillfully composed collection of poems.”
—Shelf Awareness

“The persona of ‘Madwoman’s’ contradictory conscience and memory strikes a dialogue with the poet’s younger self, and a sense of loss shadows all. . . . [A] beautifully designed book.”
—San Antonio Express-News

“There is a hunger in these lines that is furious and electrifying.”
—Nervous Poodle Poetry

“Shara McCallum is like a great marathoner traversing myth, mind, and memory. Her work steers us through the heart of troubled landscapes, as well as the landscapes of the troubled heart. ‘In the country where she lives which is no country, the madwoman maps desire’s coordinates onto her body,’ she writes in this wise, fiery new collection. There are no other poets writing with McCallum’s beautiful intensities of form and feeling.”
—Terrance Hayes

“These wonderful poems open a world of sensation and memory. But it is a world revealed by language, never just controlled. The voice that guides the action here is openhearted and openminded—a lyric presence that never deserts the subject or the reader. Syntax, craft and cadence add to the gathering music from poem to poem with—to use a beautiful phrase from the book, ‘each note tethering sound to meaning.’”
—Eavan Boland