Shara McCallum

Shara McCallum (born Kingston, Jamaica) is a Jamaican American poet, who was recently awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry.
The author of three poetry collections, McCallum's work has additionally appeared in The Antioch Review, Callaloo, Chelsea, The Iowa Review, Verse, Creative Nonfiction, Seneca Review, Witness. She graduated from the University of Miami, from the University of Maryland, with an M.F.A., and from Binghamton University in New York, with a PhD She has taught at the Stonecoast MFA program. She directs the Stadler Center for Poetry and teaches creative writing and literature at Bucknell University. She lives in Pennsylvania with her family.

• 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry
• Tennessee Individual Artist Grant in Literature
• Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant
• 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Full-length Poetry Collections

• This Strange Land (Alice James Books, forthcoming)
• Song of Thieves. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2003. ISBN 978-0-8229-5813-0. 
• The Water Between Us. University of Pittsburgh Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-8229-5710-2. 

Non Fiction

• Emmanuel Sampath Nelson, ed. (2000). "Mary Church Terrell". African American authors, 1745–1945. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-30910-6. 

Anthology publications

• Michael Collier, ed. (2000). The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology Series. University Press of New England. 
• E. Ethelbert Miller, ed. (2002). Beyond the Frontier. Black Classic Press. ISBN 978-1-57478-017-8. 
• Billy Collins, ed. (2003). Poetry 180: a turning back to poetry. Random House Trade Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-8129-6887-3. 
• Kei Miller, ed. (2007). New Caribbean poetry: an anthology. Carcanet. ISBN 978-1-85754-941-6. 

• Alice James Books > News & Events Archived 5 April 2010 at the Wayback Machine.

Shara McCallum's first collection, The Water Between Us, may be a typical first book of poetry that moves through the torments and glories of growing up, but it is not a typical collection. McCallum's poems are startling in their breadth of experience and language. From the beginning McCallum asks us to free our expectations with her apt epigraph, "Only the magic and the dream are true. All the rest's a lie"

The poems in The Water Between Us work to a compelling cumulative effect. The title of the collection, the poet’s first, refers not only to the water of birth but also to the mythological waters of memory and the unconscious.