Shara McCallum is the Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, where she also teaches. She was born in Kingston, Jamaica, to Afro-Jamaican and Venezuelan parents. She is considered one of the most versatile poets of the new generation of artists writing from the Caribbean Diaspora. She won prizes and awards and published four collections of poetry: The Water Between Us (1999, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize); Song of Thieves (2003); This Strange Land (2011) and The Face of Water. New and Selected Poems (2011). We discuss the way her personal story – she is the daughter of a multicultural family, born in Jamaica to Afro-Jamaican and Venezuelan parents – is transformed by her poetry, and how she fuses on the page different languages and experiences, transmuting words into a synaesthetic whole, brimming with colors and music. We underline how all her works deal with issues of identity, tearful separations and abandonment, but also with the wonder of self-discovery. Emotions and feelings are shaped with such craft that the reader, any reader of any country or continent, is made to share and feel the pain, the loss, the happy moments that are brought so vibrantly to the fore.
