Award-winning Jamaican American poet to read from her work at Fairfield University | Press Releases

Image: Shara McCallum Shara McCallum, award-winning author of four books of poetry, will read from her work at 6:30 p.m., October 24, in Fairfield University's Dolan School of Business Dining Room. The event is free and open to the public.

Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, McCallum is the author of four books of poetry, including The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2011) and This Strange Land (Alice James Books, 2011). She was a finalist for the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and won the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry.

Her poems have appeared in journals in the U.S., the UK, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Israel, and have been reprinted in textbooks and anthologies of American, African American, Caribbean, and world literatures. Her personal essays have been published in The Antioch Review, Creative Nonfiction, Witness , and elsewhere.

For her poetry, she has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, individual artist grants from the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, an international writers residency at the Heinrich Boll Cottage (Ireland), and an Academy of American Poets Prize.

McCallum has served as permanent faculty in the MFA program at the University of Memphis and the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine, as a visiting professor at the University of West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados, and as visiting faculty for the Drew Low-Residency MFA Program, the Catskill Poetry Workshop, the West Virginia Writers Workshop, the Frost Place, Writers at the Beach, and the Chautauqua Writer's Center.

She is director of the Stadler Center for Poetry and professor of English at Bucknell University.

McCallum's appearance is sponsored by Fairfield University's Humanities Institute of the College of Arts and Sciences , the Department of English , the programs in American Studies , Black Studies , Core Writing , Honors , Latin American and Caribbean Studies , Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies and the MFA in Creative Writing.