AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "SPRINGBANK" BY JAMAICAN-BORN POET SHARA McCALLUM



SHARA McCALLUM, an award-winning poet and writer, was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1972, to an Afro-Jamaican father and a Venezuelan mother. When she was nine years old, her family migrated to the United States where she later graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Miami. She earned her MFA from the University of Maryland and a PhD in African American and Caribbean Literature from Binghamton University in New York.


McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Israel. She is the author of six books of poetry published in the US and UK. These books include:
~ No Ruined Stone (2021)
~ Madwoman (2017), winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in poetry
~ This Strange Land (2011)
~ The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (2011)
~ Song of Thieves (2003) and
~ The Water Between Us (1999), winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize


Other Honors and Awards include:
~ Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress
~ National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry
~ Tennessee Individual Artist Grant in Literature
~ Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant and
~ Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction


After teaching creative writing and literature at various universities, McCallum is presently an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. Appointed the 2021-2022 Penn State Laureate, she delivers readings and events throughout the State of Pennsylvania, other American states, and internationally. She lives in Pennsylvania with her family.



Photo of Shara McCallum published on the Poet's Website.



POEM "SPRINGBANK" BY SHARA McCALLUM



Was all the world I'd known.

A child there, I was hers, Miss Nancy's kin,

no matter this skin, these eyes belonging

to his face. Your father could not

look at you without seeing disgrace

was the only answer she'd relent to offer.

Even when her life waned, she would not

unlock the past, tell me what she'd said

that made him let us go, why he paid

and paid to send us away and away.

We left first for Kingston, and a door

closed behind us, a door

I was never meant to open again.

In Kingston, my grandmother was passed off

as my slave. By the time our ship docked

in Greenock, she was my servant, and we

threaded into a tale, so tightly

woven no one would guess my origin.

What she sacrificed was everything

of herself to see me freed. But my father?

You kent him and his world so intimately

what I've surmised will be no surprise.

What Douglas understood was expedience.

I was simply evidence. I needed to be erased.


SOURCE: No Ruined Stone, narrative poetry collection by Shara McCallum, first published by Peepal Tree Press Ltd, UK, 2021.

Also published by Alice James Books, USA, 2021.




NO RUINED STONE - POETRY COLLECTION BY SHARA McCALLUM



BLURBS ON BACK COVER OF BOOK

In musical, evocative language, her poems imagine the what-if-that-almost-was of Scotland's best-loved Bard, following Burns into the life he might have lived as a plantation overseer in Jamaica--then seeing his enslaved granddaughter come back to Scotland to claim a life reserved for white women. EVIE SHOCKLEY

This collection is timely and timeless as it reframes the complicated genealogies created by colonialism. Erasure is one of the colonizer's most insidious tools and McCallum's gorgeous monologues serve to reclaim the voices ignored, unsaid, and unclaimed because of colonialism. ADRIAN MATEJKA

AUTHOR'S NOTE ON SCOTLAND'S ROLE IN WEST INDIAN SLAVERY


There has been in Scotland a longstanding tendency to ascribe West Indian slavery entirely to the English, though in the last twenty years this has begun to change. It's well documented by historians and other researchers of the 18th century that many of the "merchants" in and around Glasgow trafficked in and amassed huge profits from the slave trade. By the late 18th-century, over a third of the whites in Jamaica were Scottish, and Scots owned 30% of the plantations and 32% of enslaved Africans on the island. Jamaica was the most valuable British colony during slavery, producing the greatest wealth for individual plantation owners and building the Empire.

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