College to Host Acclaimed Poet Shara McCallum on April 7

ANNVILLE, PA (03/31/2011)(readMedia)-- The Lebanon Valley College English department will host acclaimed poet Shara McCallum on April 7 at 7 p.m. in Zimmerman Recital Hall of the Suzanne H. Arnold Art Gallery. McCallum will read excerpts from her newest book, This Strange Land.

Karla Huston of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences calls This Strange Land a "marvelous collection filled with a lovely and evocative music" that is "highly recommended."

Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, McCallum is the author of three individual collections of poetry, This Strange Land (2011), Song of Thieves (2003), and The Water Between Us (1999). A fourth book, At the Water's Edge: New & Selected Poems, is to be published in September.

Her poems have appeared in journals in five countries, reprinted in textbooks and anthologies of American, African American, Caribbean, and World Literatures, and translated into Spanish and Romanian. Her personal essays appear in The Antioch Review, Creative Nonfiction, Witness, and elsewhere.

She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, individual artist grants from the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and an Academy of American Poets Prize, and has been a Cave Canem Fellow and a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference.

McCallum was a faculty member of the Universities of Memphis and Southern Maine MFA programs, and has served as visiting faculty for the Catskill Poetry Workshop, the West Virginia Writers Workshop, the Frost Place, and the Chautauqua Writer's Center.

She lives with her family in Pennsylvania, where she teaches and directs the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University.

For information, contact Dr. Cathy Romagnolo at (717) 867-6247, romagnol@lvc.edu, or stamm@lvc.edu.

Posted Thursday March 31, 2011 at 09:41 am by Lebanon Valley College
Last Updated Tuesday April 05, 2011 at 08:09 am