A report from Jamaica’s Gleaner.

The Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, will host the launch of Shara McCallum’s collection of poetry, Madwoman (Alice James Books, US & Peepal Tree Press, UK), on Sunday at 11:00 am in the Neville Hall Lecture Theatre (N1), Faculty of Humanities and Education.

Madwoman is McCallum’s fifth collection of poetry. Poet Terrance Hayes writes of Madwoman: “Shara McCallum is like a great marathoner traversing myth, mind and memory. Her work steers us through the heart of troubled landscapes, as well as the landscapes of the troubled heart…There are no other poets writing with McCallum’s beautiful intensities of form and feeling.”

McCallum’s other works include The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems(Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2011); This Strange Land (Alice James Books, US, 2011), which was a finalist for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature; Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 2003); and The Water Between Us(University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 1999), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry.

Originally from Jamaica, McCallum earned an M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. in English Literature at Binghamton University. Since 2003, McCallum has served as director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, where she also holds the Margaret Hollinshead Ley Professorship in Poetry and Creative Writing.

Recognition for her work includes a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, inclusion in the Best American Poetry series, and a poetry prize from the Academy of American Poets.

The launch speaker will be Jamaican poet Tanya Shirley, adjunct lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English, UWI, Mona, and author of the acclaimed She Who Sleeps With Bones (Peepal Tree Press, 2009).

The public is invited to attend. For details, the Department of Literatures in English can be contacted at at 927-2177 or litsengmona@gmail.com.