‘In those rhythms, I heard poetry’
Shara McCallum, PhD ’99, returns as visiting Distinguished Writer
Continuing a tradition of featuring nationally and internationally recognized writers and bringing influential writers directly to the ý community, the Distinguished Writers Series will bring Shara M. McCallum, PhD ’99, to campus this semester.
Among her many career highlights is a passion for bringing both her unique voice and the cultural legacy present in her work further into the public eye.
“Literature should represent the fullness of humanity. For hundreds of years, it has not done so. I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to contribute a perspective that will enrich the canons,” she said. “There are many writers who are fleshing out and adding to the literature of what it means to be human, by giving voice to characters or to subjectivities that we have not had enough of.”
McCallum is the author of seven books, including Behold, forthcoming in 2026; No Ruined Stone, winner of the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry; and Madwoman, winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Caribbean Poetry Prize. She has received several prizes, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Musgrave Medal and the Oran Robert Perry Burke Nonfiction Award. From 2021-22, she served as the Penn State Laureate; she is currently serving as an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State.
The base of McCallum’s work reflects her upbringing in a Rastafarian home in Jamaica. Her poetry has explored what it means to emerge from such a space and enter a new world of American landscapes and values, among other themes.
“Often, everything for me begins in childhood. My father was Jamaican, and my mother was a Venezuelan immigrant to Jamaica,” she added. “My foundation as a poet, long before I ever thought I would be a writer, were the storytelling traditions that I was growing up with, the songs I was hearing. My father was a singer and a songwriter, so I was exposed to music; my mother read me the King James translation of the Hebrew Bible every day. In those rhythms, I heard poetry.”
McCallum eventually migrated to Miami, where, she said, her public education was rich in the arts. Still, she didn’t realize she wanted to be a writer until her 20s, previously pursuing a pre-med degree before being exposed to contemporary poetry and realizing that it was a living art form and tradition.
She went on to receive her master’s degree in poetry from the University of Maryland, and then a doctorate from ý in English literature. She pursued this higher education because she wanted to devote more time to reading and developing as a writer, specifically in areas she was less versed in: Caribbean and African American poetics and literature.
“What I felt I had a great schooling in as an undergraduate was in a canon that no longer is the sole focus of the study of literature — British Romantic poetry and British literature prior to the 20th century,” McCallum added. “That early training has continued to serve me well, but what drew me to ý was the ability to expand my knowledge and to keep growing as a poet. The focus of my coursework and exams were scholarly during my doctorate, but I was also able to submit my first book of poems as my dissertation. There are not a lot of doctoral programs that allow you that kind of hybridity and flexibility.”
While at ý, McCallum likewise found diverse community and mentorship through a group of women advisors across campus: Ruth Stone, an emeritus faculty member; Liz Rosenberg, a poet and children’s author; Libby Tucker, folklorist; Susan Strehle, an Americanist; and Beth Burch, a scholar of Jewish literatures and writing pedagogy.
Together, they helped guide her toward independent work — even though many of these researchers were only tangentially connected to the Caribbean — and today, their influence is reflected in McCallum’s work. For example, she explored the trope of the tragic mulatto in African American literature with Strehle; this theme plays a pivotal part in No Ruined Stone, which mythologizes the poet Robert Burns and his imagined Jamaican descendants.
The collection reframes the complicated genealogies created by colonialism; Burns, she learned, almost went to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation, which didn’t align fully with her notion of his work about liberty, freedom and democracy. After exploring the archives on the topic, McCallum asked herself a question she never had before: What would have happened had he gone?
“History tends to elide certain subjects in favor of telling stories that are palatable or promote the dominant group’s notions of themselves and others. The book was born of wanting to intervene into that and of threads of my own personal experience, being Black but looking white,” she said. “I wrote a book about Burns, but also about his imagined granddaughter, who ends up escaping slavery by passing for white. She is, somewhat, a version of Shara, or an avatar for me. Ultimately, it was interesting to see how I could use the research and parts of my own experience in the service of creating a character whose conditions were fundamentally different than mine.”
This interest with history, and its public and personal intersections, has been longstanding in McCallum’s career, despite the unique method of exploring it as a speculative novel-in-verse in her more recent work. Even her first book — which she wrote in her 20s and which was accepted for publication while she was still a student at the University — investigated complex subjects and required historical research into race, gender and culture.
In addition to her commitment to writing books that explore these subjects, she hopes she leaves her mark through her students and those she has worked with over her 30-year teaching career.
“When I think about things that endure beyond me, what comes to mind is not only my own writing but my teaching. I know how to help somebody see what a poem’s possibilities are, and I take enormous pleasure in having that conversation with my students. I love being able to look very closely at a poem and see its inner workings and help illuminate that for younger writers,” she said. “Some of my former students have gone on to publish and win huge awards, and I have enjoyed and been gratified to be a part of their development and journeys.”
And now, McCallum will have another opportunity to continue her dual work as a teacher and a scholar: for the next 18 months, she will work as a fellow at the University of Leeds. This will entail several extended trips and teaching opportunities in England, and she plans to explore potential ideas for her next book by digging into their archives, since the U.K. has a large Caribbean diasporic presence.
In the meantime, for McCallum, being invited back to ý is an honor. She is especially touched because it is one of her former academic homes, and she finds it meaningful to be both remembered by faculty and able to participate in discourse with writers and scholars she respects.
Also, as the first member of her family to attend university, she hopes that her career path may inspire potential students to pursue college degrees or follow their own passions.
“I had no idea that poetry was something one could do, because I had never been exposed to it. Had I not gone to university, who knows if I would be in front of you as a poet today? My mother and my grandmother were smart, but they had children young, and they didn’t go to university. My mother-in-law, too, didn’t have the access that I have had,” she said. “There are many students at ý for whom poetry or whatever they choose to study is their pathway to a larger world and understanding of the world.”