Poet Shara McCallum MFA ’96 Named 2023 Guggenheim Fellow

The fellowship will support McCallum’s upcoming project, a collection of poems in response to Jamaican visual art.

By Chloe Kim

Shara McCallum MFA ’96, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University and a faculty member in the Pacific Low-Residency MFA Program, has received a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship to support her work in poetry.

McCallum will travel to Jamaica to work with Jamaican contemporary visual artists to inspire her next poetry collection, which centers on the technique of “ekphrasis,” a vivid form of descriptive writing in response to visual art. The project is a continuation of McCallum’s previous work exploring her identity and background as a mixed-race Jamaican woman born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother.

Guggenheim Fellowships support mid-career scholars and artists who show exceptional promise for their future endeavors. The fellowships are intended to grant these professionals full creative freedom in pursuing their work. The author of six books, McCallum was one of 171 individuals chosen in 2023 out of almost 2,500 applicants.

“It’s a gift. That’s the word that keeps coming to mind to me,” McCallum said. “What an incredible gift and an honor to be in the company of writers who have historically been granted this support.”

McCallum’s poems, while not always explicitly autobiographical, have drawn from personal and family narratives to explore subjects such as Jamaican history and themes of immigration, race, gender and identity. 

Her methodology also heavily incorporates research, a practice she says she first cultivated decades ago at the University of Maryland as a young creative writing student in the Department of English.

“It was such a pivotal time in my life, honestly. It was laying the groundwork for all the things I would then go on to practice as a writer,” McCallum said. “I was learning so much about craft and thinking through poems, but it was my literature courses, particularly in African American and Caribbean literature, where I felt there was another part of me that was present. I loved having access to both of those worlds at that time.”

McCallum, who earned a Ph.D. in English literature from Binghamton University, conceived her 2021 publication “No Ruined Stone” after learning that the 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns had, at one point, almost moved to Jamaica to work on a plantation.

“I was really struck by that anecdote about his life,” McCallum said. “So the book imagines, in poetry in a series of dramatic monologues, what would’ve happened had he gone.”

“No Ruined Stone” won the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and was named a finalist for the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize.

Now, after five years working on “No Ruined Stone,” McCallum said she is eager to explore new practices steeped in art. She is an admirer of Jamaican art, particularly from the pre-independence period.

With the support of the Guggenheim Fellowship, McCallum will take leave from her teaching work, allowing her to focus on her research and writing full-time.

“The truth is, I can’t write a lot when I’m teaching,” McCallum said. “This will allow me to take a year’s leave from teaching, and I think really for the first time I can track in my life, I’ll wake up in the morning and I’ll think, ‘I can just read or write today.’”