Shara McCallum: "What's the coolest sound you've heard recently?"

Shara McCallum was born in Jamaica to an African Jamaican father and  a Venezuelan mother and moved to the United States with her family when  she was nine. She earned a BA from the University of Miami, an MFA from  the University of Maryland, and a PhD from Binghamton University. Her  collections of poetry, published in the US and UK, include No Ruined  Stone (2021). McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals,  anthologies, and textbooks throughout the US, Caribbean, Latin America,  Europe, and Israel. 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. She  is a Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State University and,  from 2003-17, served as the director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at  Bucknell University. McCallum has received a poetry fellowship from the  National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Award from the  Library of Congress, and other distinctions. In 2018, she was awarded  the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for poetry. https://sharamccallum.com/