UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Shara McCallum, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State, has been named a Guggenheim Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
The Guggenheim Foundation was created in 1925 “to further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions,” according to the foundation’s website. Fellows are selected through a peer-reviewed process each year based on their “prior accomplishment and exceptional promise.”
“I am, beyond measure, grateful for the foundation’s validation of poetry and feel incredibly fortunate to have their support," said McCallum. "The fellowship will allow me an extended period to focus my time and energies on writing, and I’m eager to see where that carries me and my work. To have such a gift of time is not something I take lightly, and I plan to make the most of it.”
“I am thrilled that Shara is receiving this highly prestigious and highly competitive honor,” said Clarence Lang, Susan Welch Dean of the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts. “She is an incredibly gifted poet who generously shares that gift with her students, which helps nurture their interest in the craft and lays the foundation for the next generation of poets.”
The Guggenheim Fellowship is just the latest in a string of honors bestowed on McCallum. In 2022, for example, McCallum received the Hurston/Wright Foundation Award for Poetry for her 2021 book, “No Ruined Stone.” Named for African American writers Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, the awards program honors exemplary Black fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from the United States and around the world.
In 2021, McCallum received the prestigious silver Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica. The Musgrave Medal, akin to the United States’ Presidential Medal of Freedom, honors Jamaican individuals for demonstrated excellence in their respective fields of literature, arts and science. Established in 1889, it is the oldest award of its kind to be bestowed in the Western Hemisphere.
She also served as Penn State Laureate for the 2021-22 academic year. An annual faculty honor established in 2008, the Penn State Laureate is a full-time faculty member in the arts or humanities who is assigned half time for one academic year to bring greater visibility to the arts, the humanities, and the University, as well as to their own work. McCallum appeared at numerous events and speaking engagements throughout the commonwealth during her tenure. She also created and served as the initial host of Poetry Moment on WPSU — a weekly series designed to showcase the wealth of poets and poetry in Pennsylvania.
Other awards received by McCallum include the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize for Caribbean Literature for her book, “Madwoman”; a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress; a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction; and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for her first book, “The Water Between Us.” She has authored six books in total and has had poems and essays published in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Her work has been translated into multiple languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Dutch and Turkish — including a full-length bilingual anthology of her poems, titled “la historia es un cuarto/History is a Room,” which was published in Mexico in 2021. McCallum’s poems have also been set to music by composers Marta Gentilucci and Gity Razaz.