Spring 2025 | Shara McCallum | Vol. 8, Iss. 4
Welcome to The Fight & The Fiddle, a publication of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University. Each issue gives you a 360-degree view of a Black poet, including an interview, new poems, a critical essay, and a writing prompt inspired by our featured poet.
Shara McCallum is a poet, educator, and widely published author. Her works include Behold (forthcoming in 2026); No Ruined Stone (2021), winner of the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry; Madwoman (2017), winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in Poetry; The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (2011); This Strange Land (2011); Song of Thieves (2003); and The Water Between Us (1999), winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. McCallum has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the NEA, the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; she has also received a college prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her honors include the Silver Musgrave Medal, the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, among others. McCallum’s work has been featured in the Best American Poetry series, and in her radio program “Poetry Moment” which she created and hosted as the 2021-22 Penn State Laureate. From 2003-2017, she served as the director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, and she is currently an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University.
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- Interview: Shara McCallum speaks with poet L. Renée about identity, history, and myth in her poetic practices.
- Critical Essay: Rhony Bhopla considers McCallum’s approach of “active waiting” in her most recent collection, No Ruined Stone
- Poems: Read “Passage” and “Outside the Frame,” by Shara McCallum.
- Writing Prompt: Engaging the Archives: What business do you have with history?
Read the transcription here
Photo by Joaquin Sosa
Cover Design by Robert Mott
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