Shara McCallum is from Jamaica, of Jamaican and Venezuelan parentage. She is the author of seven books of poetry, published in the US and the UK, including No Ruined Stone, winner of the 2022 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award in Poetry; and Madwoman, winner of both the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize and the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize in 2018. Behold was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2026. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Musgrave Medal and NEA Poetry Fellowship among other awards. Appointed a Cheney Creative Fellow at the University of Leeds for 2026-27, McCallum is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University, USA.