AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "WHY MADWOMAN SHOULDN'T READ THE NEWS" BY CARIBBEAN 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 Caribbean, Europe, Israel, Latin America, and the United States. She is the author of seven poetry books published in the US and UK. These books include:

  • No Ruined Stone (2021), winner of the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and finalist for the UNT Rilke Prize
  • Madwoman (2017), winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in Poetry and the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize
  • This Strange Land (2011)
  • The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (2011)
  • This Strange Land (2011), shortlisted for the 2012 OCM Bocas Poetry Prize for Caribbean Literature
  • Song of Thieves (2003) and
  • The Water Between Us (1999), winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize

Other Honors and Awards include:

  • Guggenheim Fellowship, Guggenheim Foundation (2023)
  • Penn State Laureate, Penn State University (2021-2022)
  • Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction, The Southern Review (2021)
  • Silver Musgrave Medal, Institute of Jamaica (2021)
  • Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress (2013)
  • National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (2011)
  • Tennessee Individual Artist Grant in Literature (2000) and
  • Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant for an Individual Artist (2000)


Since 2021, after teaching creative writing and literature at various universities, McCallum is presently an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. She lives in Pennsylvania with her family.


Author Photo from official website https://sharamccallum.com/


WHY MADWOMAN SHOULDN'T READ THE NEWS BY SHARA McCALLUM



I know you'll say I'm overreacting,

but my mother's prophesying has come to pass:

Armageddon is upon us. Just look at the evidence:

the carriers of our species at every second

being raped and killed and the rare ones

who survive offing their lovers and children

(or worse, if it can be believed, wearing bangs),

molesters and gun-toters skulking

in every lunchbox, the environment

churning into apocalypse. Oh, kids,

please save us the heartache and leave

in advance, calmly but quickly

abandon your seesaws and swings. Friends,

do you remember when we were young?

Life plump with promise and dreams?

Me neither. Anyway, who'd be naive enough

now to believe in anything so impossible-

to-attain as happiness or justice? Sure








WHY MADWOMAN SHOULDN'T READ THE NEWS continued



we had a run of it. Even some laughs.

But the day's arrived, as deep down we knew

it would, and spectacles streaming

from across the globe should convince

even the most sceptical

of our soon-to-be extinction.

Not that we listen to true madmen

anymore, but the older I get

the more certain I become: my father

would have been heralded a prophet

had he lived, would have joined the brethren

and sistren on every street corner, trumpeting

this end from the beginning.




Source: Madwoman, poetry collection by Shara McCallum, published by Peepal Tree Press Ltd., UK, 2017, p. 47.