Award Winning Poet Reads from Works March 13

SALISBURY, MD---Shara McCallum, born in Jamaica to an Afro-Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, and winner of several prestigious poetry awards, is the next speaker in Salisbury State University’s Writers-on-the-Shore Series.

Part of the Spring Literary Festival, the poet reads on Tuesday, March 13, at 8 p.m. in the Montgomery Room of the Commons. The event is free and the public is invited. A reception follows. 

Her first book of poetry, The Water Between Us, a tale of cultural fragmentation based on Anancy tales, Greek myths and biblical stories won the Starrett Prize.

McCallum is also the winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems also appear in a number of anthologies, including American Poetry: the Next Generation, Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the 21st Century, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, and Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature.

McCallum immigrated to the U.S. at the age of nine and completed an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. in Poetry and African American and Caribbean Literature from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

McCallum is on the faculty at The University of Memphis in Tennessee.

The SSU Department of English and Multiethnic Services sponsor the event. 

For information visit the University’s Web site at www.salisbury.edu or call 410-543-6540.