My Poetry Corner May 2025 features the poem “Why Madwoman Shouldn’t Read the News” from the poetry collection, Madwoman, by the award-winning Caribbean American poet and writer Shara McCallum. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1972, to an Afro-Jamaican father and a Venezuelan mother, she was nine years old when she migrated to Miami, Florida, with her mother and sisters. Her father, a singer and songwriter, stayed behind in Jamaica.

McCallum graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Miami. She earned her MFA from the University of Maryland and a PhD in African and Caribbean Literature from Binghamton University in New York. Her poetry collection Madwoman, published in the UK and USA in 2017, won the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in Poetry and the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize (New England Poetry Club).

In Madwoman, McCallum explores themes of race, female identity, and womanhood. During a 2018 interview with Arianna Miller for the Gandy Dancer Literary Magazine, the poet explained: “Madwoman was a voice she heard in her head…. [She] eventually became a voice that McCallum could not ignore, which was actually troubling for her considering her father was a schizophrenic.”