October 12, 2021
Shara McCallum will read from her new collection of poems, No Ruined Stone.
Shara McCallum will read from her new collection of poems, No Ruined Stone. McCallum's sixth book, No Ruined Stone is a novel-in-verse that offers a speculative account of history, based on Scottish poet Robert Burn's planned migration to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation. The reading will be followed by a conversation with the author and Professor Adrienne Su about the relationship between her poetry and history, exploring themes of race, colonialism, gender, migration, exile, and memory.
The program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the departments of Latin American, Latinx & Caribbean studies and English and the Creative Writing Program.
For more information visit http://clarke.dickinson.edu/tuesday-october-12-2021/
Biography (provided by the speaker):
From Jamaica, and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US & UK, including No Ruined Stone. McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the US, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Israel. La historia es un cuarto/History is a Room, an anthology of poems selected from across her six books and translated into Spanish by Adalber Salas Hernández, will be published in 2021 by Mantis Editores in Mexico. 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. “Moving Still,” a composition by Gentilucci, premiering in September 2021 the Biennale in Venice, includes McCallum’s original text and her performance of the same. Awards for McCallum’s work include the Silver Musg rave Medal, for outstanding merit in the field of literature, from the Jamaican government; the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, for her previous book Madwoman; a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the US Library of Congress; a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry; the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction; and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for her first book The Water Between Us. McCallum delivers readings, lectures, and workshops at universities and literary festivals in the US and internationally and has taught creative writing and literature at various universities. She is presently on the faculty of the Pacific Low-Residency MFA and is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. McCallum was appointed the 2021-22 Penn State Laureate.
Further information
- Location: Anita Tuvin Schlecter Auditorium (ATS-B)
- Time: 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
- Cost: Free
