From Jamaica and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of seven books of poetry, published in the US & UK, including Behold, forthcoming in 2026. Awards for her work include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Musgrave Medal, NEA Fellowship, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for No Ruined Stone, OCM Bocas Caribbean Poetry Prize for Madwoman, Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for The Water Between Us, among others. McCallum teaches at Penn State University and from 2021-22 served as the Penn State Laureate. For more information, please visit her website: www.sharamccallum.com

"In Behold, Shara McCallum moves as a curator would, assembling a museum of migration’s afterlives—art haunted by the spectral presence of those of us grappling with migration’s wake. Each poem is an object lesson in the root of curating, curare—to care: to gather what has been abandoned, to tend to grief through beauty, to attune to those silenced in the archives—the laborers in cane fields, the children left behind, the ancestors bound by red threads. To behold art shaped by migration is to witness both beauty and wound, rupture and repair."
—Grace Aneiza Ali, Curator

"Few contemporary poetry books begin with such unabashedly epic, rhapsodic, prophetic a voice as Shara McCallum’s Behold. From here the journey takes us through Jamaica of the poet’s childhood to ways of perceiving the interior—in museums, galleries, art studios of the world. This formally inventive book is a singing in defense of deeper contemplation. Having seen the “surreal landscape of history’s graveyard” and understood “what it means to be a refugee in one’s own country” the poet gives us wisdom. Through McCallum’s clarity of perspective, her musical, memorable clarity, the soul stands apart, sees and is seen. With unrelenting honesty, here is a book that proposes we take a step back from the shallowness of our age and open our eyes—as the many painters and landscapes the poet finds herself in front of do—to behold the world that is ours. Behold. Behold. This is a beautiful, soul-making book."
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic