UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Poet and Penn State Liberal Arts Professor of English Shara McCallum will read from her works as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. The reading, free and open to the public, will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 25, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.
McCallum is the author of five collections of poetry: “The Water Between Us” (1999); “Song of Thieves” (2003); “This Strange Land” (2011); “The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems” (2011); and “Madwoman” (2017). Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including The Antioch Review, Chelsea, The Iowa Review, and Verse. Previous accolades include the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize in 1998, the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress in 2013, a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant in Literature, and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.
Publisher’s Weekly offers the following review of her latest poetry collection: “Her madwoman is neither a static nor predictable character, but a thunderous storm subject to unexpected change in severity; the madwoman is both nourished and destroyed by her memories.”
McCallum was born in Jamaica and moved to the United States at the age of nine. She received her bachelor of arts degree from the University of Miami, her master of fine arts from the University of Maryland, and her doctorate in poetry and African American and Caribbean literature from Binghamton University in New York. McCallum was the director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell for ten years and now teaches creative writing and literature at Penn State.
The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series is a project within Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English. It receives generous support from College of the Liberal Arts, the Department of English, the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, the Mary E. Rolling Lectureship in Creative Writing, and the University Libraries.
For a full list of readings in the series, visit https://creativewriting.psu.edu.